HN Reader

There's a very important point made in the article - with recent export controls, domestic Chinese firms don't need to beat Nvidia's best, but only the cut-down chips cleared for Chinese export.

Can someone ELI5 this to me? Nvidia has the market cap of a medium-sized country precisely because apparently (?) no one else can make chips like them. Great tech, hard to manufacture, etc - Intel and AMD are nowhere to be seen. And I can imagine it's very tricky business!

China, admittedly full of smart and hard working people, then just wakes up one day an in a few years covers the entire gap, to within some small error?

How is this consistent? Either:

- The Chinese GPUs are not that good after all

- Nvidia doesn't have any magical secret sauce, and China could easily catch up

- Nvidia IP is real but Chinese people are so smart they can overcome decades of R&D advantage in just s few years

- It's all stolen IP

To be clear, my default guess isn't that it is stolen IP, rather I can't make sense of it. NVDA is valued near infinity, then China just turns around and produces their flagship product without too much sweat..?

Note also that today China has told its tech companies to cancel any NVIDIA AI chip orders and not to order any more:

https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...

Considering the fact China controls most of the world supply of rare minerals, considering the fact the US is lead by a incompetent leader, considering the fact Nvidia looses a big market, I think China can compete with even the leading Nvidia chips in a couple of years time.

If that happens, China in turn can export those Chips to countries that are in dire need of Chips, like Russia. They can export to Africa, South-America and the rest of Asia. Thus resulting in more competition for Nvidia. I see bright times ahead, where the USA no longer controls all of the worlds chip supply and OS systems.

I see this as an absolute win.

If CUDA isn't that strong of a moat/tie-in and Chinese tech companies can seemingly reasonably migrate to these chips, why hasn't AMD been able to compete more aggressively with nVidia on a US/global scale when they had a much longer head start?

Apparently DeepSeek’s new model has been delayed due to issues with the Huawei chips they’re using. Maybe raw floating point performance of Chinese chips is competitive with NVIDIA, but clearly there’s still a lot of issues to iron out.

US government f'ed over Nvidia's China market dominance in order to help OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI.

China shouldn't be buying H20s. Those are gimped 3 year old GPUs. If Nvidia is allowed to sell the latest and greatest in China, I think their revenue would jump massively.

Several years ago, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some Chinese parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its quality?"

Nowadays, whenever some Chinese engineers dared to propose using some American parts, the challenges he/she had to face is always "who is going to be responsible if it is not reliable enough for its supply?"

This article is propaganda.

If you have the most basic understanding of chips its not just design, as that has a high degree of coupling to manufacturing and this article doesn't say where, who or how the chips are being made.

China, at last check was behind Intels home grown chip making efforts when it came to sizes and yields.

Hype and saber rattling to get the US to (Re)act, or possibly ignore the growing black market for Nvidia gear (that also happens to be bi-directional with modified cards flowing back to the US).

Why do we look at these as a race? There is nothing to win. Nobody won space, or nukes, and they won’t win AI. You might get there first, but your competitor will get there soon after regardless. Embrace it.

This conveniently coincides with China banning purchases of Nvidia AI chips:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45275070

Not a word on compute or interconnect speeds. All this really says is they stuck some HBM on a chip.

One of these headlines in the next few months will spark a US market selloff greater than what we saw on the initial DeepSeek release.

I believe about 1000 S&P points down - to just above the trade war lows from April.

For a comparison, the latest Nvidia Blackwell cards have up to 8tb/sec memory bandwidth vs 700GB/sec here.

I am hoping they release it as a fully open-source design, or with as much documentation and openness as they can.

So about 5 years behind the cutting edge, SMIC showed their advanced lithography tools today(still no ASML) but come 2030 at this rate? Hard to say they won’t catch up.

isnt the h20 nerfed anyways? H20’s FP16/BF16 performance is reduced to ~148 TFLOPS vs ~1,979 TFLOPS for the H100?

If CUDA is nvidia's moat, which has basically created a monopoly, how long until there is an anti-monopoly trial against them in EU or even in the US?

This is typical CCP propaganda. If Alibaba truly had a chip that was remotely comparable to the H20, they wouldn’t need to ban the H20.

I hope China floods the world with cheap, affordable GPUs. We’re sick and tired of the Nvidia tax.

if the card is legit and china can scale it to millions

then its just matter of time when SOTA model is produced from china first or not

If China is ok spending a few years catching up on chips then they must not think that "AGI" or a serious takeoff of AI is near.

tldr it's somewhat comparable to an A100, which was released in May 2020.

So faced with a choice of buying hobbled H20 GPU chips vs developing their own (so far behind the SOTA), the Chinese market decided to develop/buy their own GPU chips?

Who could have possibly seen this coming? /s