China has promised to wage war and forcibly subjugate Taiwan, a democratic ally and critical trade partner. If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.
>If China backed off Taiwan for a few decades, I think the US would drop export controls.
Total historical illiteracy. if only there was an island nation immediately southeast of the US we could look to for information on how America treats countries that try the whole "back off" thing
You should really seek to actually understand an issue before you comment so arrogantly.
US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.
Traditional social norms are reversed online because there is no threat of immediate violence. Arrogance gets attention. Politeness gets ignored. Don't be so harsh. It's just how this generation communicates.
That’s just because they spun off all the high quality companies (Agilent, Keysight, Verigy, Avago). The PC server and consumer print business have always been commodity product.
The US is certainly slowing down China considerably. China would certainly not have an import ban on Blackwell GPUs if they were made available. And upstream, the ban on EUV and other high end semiconductor production equipment has severely limited china’s capacity to produce logic and DRAM (including HBM).
You severely underestimate what they can do with alternative tech paths. You don't have to chase nanometers for good AI system outcomes. Their current, and very viable, strategy is to build a ton of slower chips and to pump in a humongous amount of power. And to optimize the software stack, e.g. more efficient architectures. Unlike the west, they have a lot of cheap power (think solar panels in the desert) and excellent transmission. It also means they'll have to innovate on powder delivery and cooling systems to handle that sort of scale, but that's still easier than building EUV. Huawei has already done it with their phone from last year: they put in a more power-hungry chip, but they innovated hugely woth passive heat dissipation and bigger batteries, so the end product is still something consumers want. And with these Chinese AI models you're already seeing how they're reducing costs so they can run more on fewer chips.
That sounds like you are moving the goalpost: winning through a narrow definition of "slowing down". Defining "slowing down" as "not having access to western semiconductor ecosystem or 2nm chips" instead of "can they build economically viable AI systems/phones that achieve user objectives satisfactorily, and at scale" does not help your country/bloc with any meaningful outcomes, and merely serves to score Internet points to feel good.
No, we have certainly slowed down their progress in AI with export controls on GPUs and upstream. China would have better AI models but for those export controls.
"Better" in what way? Ultra-large frontier model performance? China doesn't need that to achieve strategic objectives, like increased productivity and automation, advanced weaponry, advanced manufacturing, user adoption and deployment at scale.
You're narrowing your claim into something you can defend but is strategically hollow. Advanced weaponry, major productivity improvements, R&D speed etc — at the end of day, those are the things the US bloc actually want to slow down. Ultra-large foundational modals was just (incorrectly) seen as the only way to achieve those objectives.
It's like you're arguing that Chinese fighters are inferior to western stealth fighters. That's true when you compare plane-by-plane on paper. And yet the Chinese airfighting system-as-a-whole was still able to down Rafaels with high precision and without being retaliated on, as shown by the India-Pakistan standoff a while ago. What's the point of arguing "we've slowed China's aircraft engine development speed" when they're still shooting down western jets?
The Chinese definitely want their own frontier model. There is an enormous national effort behind building up the semiconductor manufacturing, data center infrastructure, and networking technologies required to compete with US frontier models. Because of the export controls, the semiconductor fab capacity required for the Chinese frontier models is at least 5x larger than the TSMC/Hynix capacity.
Hyperscalers are only spending less than half of their operating cash flows on AI capex. Full commitment to achieving AGI within a few years would look much different.
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