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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 ab

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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
        you could probably train a gpt 2 sized model with sota architecture on a 2008 supercomputer. it would take a while though.
- Zigurd 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.
- PunchyHamster 10mo 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 10mo 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.

tomrod 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago
      you could probably train a gpt 2 sized model with sota architecture on a 2008 supercomputer. it would take a while though.
Zigurd 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo ago

The software is the hard part. Western software still outclasses what the chinese produce by a good amount.

PunchyHamster 10mo 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 10mo 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.