6 ms·

I'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest.

by alecco 11mo ago

I'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to. The TPUv4 and TPUv6 docs were stolen by a Chinese national in 2022/2023: https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-the-google-trade-secret-theft-indictment https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-the-goo... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-charges-chinese-national-relation-alleged-plan-steal-proprietary-ai https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-charge... And that's just 1 guy that got caught. Who knows how many other cases were there. A Chinese startup is already making clusters of TPUs and has revenue https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3334244/ai-start-offers-local-alternative-googles-tpu-china-seeks-cut-nvidia-reliance https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3334244/ai-start-...

Workaccount2 11mo ago
Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans. There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.
- tomrod 11mo ago
  Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.
  - Workaccount2 11mo ago
    This is sort of like saying there are lots of kids in the local community college shop class if you want to spin up an F1 team. The knowledge of making 2008 era chips is not a gating factor for getting a handful of atoms to function as a transistor in current SOTA chips. There are probably 100 people on earth who know how to do this, and the majority of them are in Taiwan. Again, China has literally stolen the plans for EUV lithography, years ago, and still cannot get it to work. Even Samsung and Intel, using the same machines as TSMC, cannot match what they are doing. It's a dark art in the most literal sense. Nevermind that new these cutting edge fabs cost ~$50 Billion each.
    - checker659 11mo ago
      I've always wondered. If you have fuck you money, wouldn't it be possible to build GPUs to do LLM matmul with 2008 technology. Again, assuming energy costs / cooling costs don't matter.
      - Zigurd 11mo ago
        Energy, cooling, and how much of the building you're taking up do matter. They matter less and in a more manageable way for hyperscalers that have a long established resource management practice in lots of big data centers because they can phase in new technologies as they phase out the old. But it's a lot more daunting to think about building a data center big enough to compete with one full of Blackwell systems there are more than 10 times more performant per watt and per square foot.
      - pixl97 11mo ago
        Building the clean rooms at this scale is a limitation in itself. Just getting the factory setup to and the machines put in so they don't generate particulate matter in operation is an art that compares in difficulty to making the chips themselves.
      - Workaccount2 11mo ago
        IIRC people have gotten LLMs to run on '80s hardware. Inference isn't overly compute heavy. The killer really is training, which is insanely compute intensive and really only recently hardware practical on the scale needed.
        adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
        you could probably train a gpt 2 sized model with sota architecture on a 2008 supercomputer. it would take a while though.
  - Zigurd 11mo ago
    The mask shops at TSMC and Samsung kind of are a dark art. It's one of the interesting things about the contract manufacturing business in chips. It's not just a matter of having access to state of the art equipment.
- aunty_helen 11mo ago
  For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military. The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?
  - snek_case 11mo ago
    China has their own fabs. They are behind TSMC in terms of technology, but that doesn't mean they don't have fabs. They're currently ~7nm AFAIK. That's behind TSMC, but also not useless. They are obviously trying hard to catch up. I don't think we should just imagine that they never will. China has a lot of smart engineers and they know how strategically important chip manufacturing is. This is like this funny idea people had in the early 2000s that China would continue to manufacture most US technology but they could never design their own competitive tech. Why would anyone think that? Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact. If they do invade Taiwan (please God no), it would be a horrible bloodbath. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands and probably relentless bombing. Taiwan would likely destroy its own fabs to avoid them being taken. It would be sad and horrible.
    - renewiltord 11mo ago
      If they invade Taiwan, we will scuttle the plants and direct ASML to disable their machines which they will do because that’s the condition under which we gave them the tech. They’re not going to get it this way. They’ll just catch the next wave of tech or eventually break into EUV.
      - adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
        imo the most likely answer is that asml funds a second source for the optics that isn't US controlled and starts shipping to China. The US is losing influence fast.
- radialstub 11mo ago
  The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.
  - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
    This. The amount of investment into CUDA is high enough most companies won't even consider competition, even if it was lower cost. We desperately need more open frameworks for competition to work
- mr_toad 11mo ago
  > What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. China has fabs. Most are older nodes and are used to manufacture chips used in cars and consumer electronics. They have companies that design chips (manufactured by TSMC), like the Ascend 910, which are purpose built for AI. They may be behind, but they’re not standing still.
fullofideas 11mo ago
>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to. I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans
- pixl97 11mo ago
  Nuclear power is what they are talking about, not weapons.
- alecco 11mo ago
  I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA. About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.
- dylanowen 11mo ago
  I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads
  - renewiltord 11mo ago
    We should ask ourselves: is it worth ruining local communities in order to beat China in the global sphere?
    - pstuart 11mo ago
      That question was asked and answered years ago and the answer is YES (not me personally, but the people in charge) There are things about China not to be celebrated but one cannot help but admire the way that they invest in their country as a whole. The US is all about "what's in it for me".
      - 11mo ago
llm_nerd 11mo ago
>It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. How would this be a deadly blow to Google? Google makes TPUs for their own services and products, avoiding paying the expensive nvidia tax. If other people make similar products, this has effectively zero impact on Google. nvidia knew their days were numbered, at least in their ownership of the whole market. And China hardly had to steal the great plans for a TPU to make one, and a FMA/MAC unit is actually a surprisingly simple bit of hardware to design. Everyone is adding "TPUs" in their chips - Apple, Qualcomm, Google, AMD, Amazon, Huawei, nvidia (that's what tensor cores are) and everyone else. And that startup isn't the big secret. Huawei already has solutions matching the H20. Once the specific need that can be serviced by an ASIC is clear, everyone starts building it. >America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to What great advantage do you think this is? America isn't remotely the great gatekeeper on this. If anything, Taiwan + the Netherlands (ASML) are. China would yield infinitely more value in learning manufacturing and fabrication secrets than cloning some specific ASIC.
lukasb 11mo ago
Yeah I'm terrified that TPUs will get cheaper, that would be awful.
pests 11mo ago
Half the article was about the extensive software codependency between TPU's, Borb, lilpunet, their optical switching network, etc. How much of that is manufacturing and not just software and engineering experience, which won't be so easy to copy?

by alecco 11mo ago

Workaccount2 11mo ago

Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans. There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.

tomrod 11mo ago
Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  This is sort of like saying there are lots of kids in the local community college shop class if you want to spin up an F1 team. The knowledge of making 2008 era chips is not a gating factor for getting a handful of atoms to function as a transistor in current SOTA chips. There are probably 100 people on earth who know how to do this, and the majority of them are in Taiwan. Again, China has literally stolen the plans for EUV lithography, years ago, and still cannot get it to work. Even Samsung and Intel, using the same machines as TSMC, cannot match what they are doing. It's a dark art in the most literal sense. Nevermind that new these cutting edge fabs cost ~$50 Billion each.
  - checker659 11mo ago
    I've always wondered. If you have fuck you money, wouldn't it be possible to build GPUs to do LLM matmul with 2008 technology. Again, assuming energy costs / cooling costs don't matter.
    - Zigurd 11mo ago
      Energy, cooling, and how much of the building you're taking up do matter. They matter less and in a more manageable way for hyperscalers that have a long established resource management practice in lots of big data centers because they can phase in new technologies as they phase out the old. But it's a lot more daunting to think about building a data center big enough to compete with one full of Blackwell systems there are more than 10 times more performant per watt and per square foot.
    - pixl97 11mo ago
      Building the clean rooms at this scale is a limitation in itself. Just getting the factory setup to and the machines put in so they don't generate particulate matter in operation is an art that compares in difficulty to making the chips themselves.
    - Workaccount2 11mo ago
      IIRC people have gotten LLMs to run on '80s hardware. Inference isn't overly compute heavy. The killer really is training, which is insanely compute intensive and really only recently hardware practical on the scale needed.
      - adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
        you could probably train a gpt 2 sized model with sota architecture on a 2008 supercomputer. it would take a while though.
- Zigurd 11mo ago
  The mask shops at TSMC and Samsung kind of are a dark art. It's one of the interesting things about the contract manufacturing business in chips. It's not just a matter of having access to state of the art equipment.
aunty_helen 11mo ago
For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military. The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?
- snek_case 11mo ago
  China has their own fabs. They are behind TSMC in terms of technology, but that doesn't mean they don't have fabs. They're currently ~7nm AFAIK. That's behind TSMC, but also not useless. They are obviously trying hard to catch up. I don't think we should just imagine that they never will. China has a lot of smart engineers and they know how strategically important chip manufacturing is. This is like this funny idea people had in the early 2000s that China would continue to manufacture most US technology but they could never design their own competitive tech. Why would anyone think that? Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact. If they do invade Taiwan (please God no), it would be a horrible bloodbath. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands and probably relentless bombing. Taiwan would likely destroy its own fabs to avoid them being taken. It would be sad and horrible.
  - renewiltord 11mo ago
    If they invade Taiwan, we will scuttle the plants and direct ASML to disable their machines which they will do because that’s the condition under which we gave them the tech. They’re not going to get it this way. They’ll just catch the next wave of tech or eventually break into EUV.
    - adgjlsfhk1 11mo ago
      imo the most likely answer is that asml funds a second source for the optics that isn't US controlled and starts shipping to China. The US is losing influence fast.
radialstub 11mo ago
The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  This. The amount of investment into CUDA is high enough most companies won't even consider competition, even if it was lower cost. We desperately need more open frameworks for competition to work
mr_toad 11mo ago
> What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. China has fabs. Most are older nodes and are used to manufacture chips used in cars and consumer electronics. They have companies that design chips (manufactured by TSMC), like the Ascend 910, which are purpose built for AI. They may be behind, but they’re not standing still.

fullofideas 11mo ago

>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to. I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans

pixl97 11mo ago
Nuclear power is what they are talking about, not weapons.
alecco 11mo ago
I mean they have the power grid to run TPUs at 10x the scale of USA. About students, have you seen the microelectronic labs in American universities lately? A huge chunk are Chinese already. Same with some of the top AI labs.
dylanowen 11mo ago
I assume the nuclear reactors are to power the data centers using the new chips. There have been a few mentions on HN about the US being very behind in building enough power plants to run LLM workloads
- renewiltord 11mo ago
  We should ask ourselves: is it worth ruining local communities in order to beat China in the global sphere?
  - pstuart 11mo ago
    That question was asked and answered years ago and the answer is YES (not me personally, but the people in charge) There are things about China not to be celebrated but one cannot help but admire the way that they invest in their country as a whole. The US is all about "what's in it for me".
    - 11mo ago

llm_nerd 11mo ago

>It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. How would this be a deadly blow to Google? Google makes TPUs for their own services and products, avoiding paying the expensive nvidia tax. If other people make similar products, this has effectively zero impact on Google. nvidia knew their days were numbered, at least in their ownership of the whole market. And China hardly had to steal the great plans for a TPU to make one, and a FMA/MAC unit is actually a surprisingly simple bit of hardware to design. Everyone is adding "TPUs" in their chips - Apple, Qualcomm, Google, AMD, Amazon, Huawei, nvidia (that's what tensor cores are) and everyone else. And that startup isn't the big secret. Huawei already has solutions matching the H20. Once the specific need that can be serviced by an ASIC is clear, everyone starts building it. >America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to What great advantage do you think this is? America isn't remotely the great gatekeeper on this. If anything, Taiwan + the Netherlands (ASML) are. China would yield infinitely more value in learning manufacturing and fabrication secrets than cloning some specific ASIC.

lukasb 11mo ago

Yeah I'm terrified that TPUs will get cheaper, that would be awful.

pests 11mo ago

Half the article was about the extensive software codependency between TPU's, Borb, lilpunet, their optical switching network, etc. How much of that is manufacturing and not just software and engineering experience, which won't be so easy to copy?