Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.
This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.
The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.
If this principle were true, then autarchies like North Korea would be the most advantaged since they never have to worry about international competition in their domestic market.
Your confidence is not backed by any data or observation, it's just an unfounded inference.
OT but one thing I didn't realize until reading this comment:
Those used CMP 170HX 8GB were advertised in front of crypto server rigs. Those were probably spread across South Asian scam malls(shopping mall buildings built in literal sovereignty contested areas of non-China/Japan/Korea/Russia non-India non-African non-Muslim Asia, under guises of Chinese tourist destinations, that are literally rented out to local Chinese-speaking gangs engaging in all sorts of gang crimes from tech support scams to human and organ trafficking, straight out of the fictitious Chiba in Neuromancer), and they would happily sell or rent compute to Chinese AI firms if only those were more valuable than 8GB VRAM they have, which they all had all along.
GPU export to China must have become significantly less meaningful since the 170HX unlock became a thing. That alone must have provided petaflops of unsanctioned untraced junks for parts priced compute to Chinese AI startups.
There are. A lot of Nvidia chips are still stuck in Hong Kong.
What the government does is not always what corporations follow.
https://nationaltechnology.co.uk/Nvidia_GPUs_Sitting_Unused_...
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/u-s-commerce-secr...
"About 600,000 of Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, two people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports despite demand from tech firms" [1].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/nvidia-chips-pile-up-hon...
I do not know full details, but China did exactly that. There were articles about limiting Nvidia chip imports more than a year ago. It really highlighted the absurdity of the export ban.
To my non-expert knowledge, the reasoning behind the export ban has never been explained beyond a vague assertion that China would do some sort of evil with AI if they have bigger GPUs than some arbitrary number of transistors, and also some silliness where paying a 15% tax made some of the GPUs safe to export. It has been pretty great for Huawei.
Both China’s geopolitical situation and technological history point towards them cutting any reliance on a foreign tech stack as soon as they can.
As I see it, giving them chips just means they have less of a gap to close when their own EUV fabs come online, it can’t have any delaying effect on their plans.
Yeah, no. No one in Beijing will let Nvidia or the White House have that kind of power in the long run because the free market knows best and golly gee where will we get the money and whatnot. They will buy whatever they can to bridge the gap to a time when they own their own tap.
It's not a completely dissimilar argument to selling them the nukes or F-35s because "it will deny oxygen/money to the Chinese nukes and fighter jets market".
The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.
If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...
The best reason to NOT ban exports is that it really doesn't work against a peer state, and China is close enough now to count. Given the significant economic trouble in the PRC (youth unemployment, unwinding the property bubble, overproduction of EVs) the US could definitely have played this better instead of creating a vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China.
They hired old asml employees.
This has crashed, check the markets.
They do not need a ban to light a fire under them. The fire is already lit and burning and nothing the west can do will even slightly dampen it.
You yourself claim they are within a couple of years. If that's the case you think they will stop developing if we sell them chips? That's laughable.
Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.