🏛️ US compute export controls keep China off the AI frontier from 2025

“Yeah, it's not comparable to Colossus. So it's just, it's not going to be decisive in this, you know, AI, you know, race that certainly China believes we're in.”

“these open-source models are catching up pretty fast. We're ahead in many other aspects. Our chips are a lot better. Our data centers are better and so on.”

“And so I think it's a smart decision for America to sell this chip that gives America the advantage in AI and keeps China from developing kind of their own domestic alternatives, which could eventually kind of challenge Nvidia, AMD, you know, other kind of American AI accelerator champions globally. We don't want that to happen. So I thought it was a mistake when they banned the chips. And I'm really happy and think it's really good for America if that is being reversed.”

“So I do think that the lithography IP moat is being crossed in China. I do think that China is developing actually new technology for DUV and EUV systems. I do think that there's a risk to Nvidia's core. ... we're creating every incentive for an alternative to Nvidia to emerge from China.”

“I think Sacks' work on the diffusion rule, just generally, I don't think has gone enough attention in the rescinding of the diffusion rule, which essentially handicapped our ability to even arm our allies with our semiconductor technology.”

“I think that most people in Washington believe that the export controls on China make sense, because we simply can't allow our most powerful semiconductors to be used by China because of the dual use. Now, where I agree with Jensen is that I think we should not place undue restrictions on the rest of the world using the American tech stack, because we will simply concede the market share to China.”

“I think that the technology that they need is extremely non-trivial, and I do think that it actually slows them down quite a bit if they don't have access to it.”

“I think we should keep them dependent. Keep selling it to them.”

“So, Jay Cal, I think they're doing it either way. I think that they're going to invest and build their own EUV and chip manufacturing capacity either way.”

“It seems to me that at some point you have to say that some technologies are just too sensitive to be sold to China. And so then the question is, are you drawing the line in the right place?”

“The components to do the manufacturing, so there's a company called ASML, which everyone that works in tech knows about. They have these advanced lithography systems to make the semiconductors. They don't sell to China, so now China's got their own homegrown lithography systems.”

“In the next five years, I think zero. I think it's really, really hard. But over the 10 years, who knows? And if you're the CCP, 10 years isn't that long. If you're America, 10 years is an eternity.”

“I think they're doing it now. They're trying now.”

“while China is, you know, their kids are the leaders in AI. You know, DeepSeek should show us that, you know, we have underestimated China every step of the way.”

“The point I would agree with is that it's going to happen anyway. And that's what DeepSeek proved. You can turn off the flow of chips to them, and you can turn off the flow of talent. What do they do? They just get more efficient, and they exported it back to us. They sent us back the best open source model when our guys were staying closed source for safety reasons.”

“I think that the whole Paris AI Summit took place against the backdrop of this recognition, because just a few weeks ago, we had deep sea. And it's really clear that China is not a year behind us. They're hot on our heels or only maybe months behind us. And so if we hobble ourselves with unnecessary regulations, if we make it more difficult for our AI companies to compete, that doesn't mean that China is going to follow suit and copy us. They're going to take advantage of that fact and they're going to win.”

“I think that decision has been proven even more right in the wake of DeepSeek, because we know that China has basically caught up, or they're very, very close to catching up.”

“And so if we do cut off access to NVIDIA chips, we do cut off access to US exports, are we not kind of recognizing that the second order effect of that is that China will take IP that they've stolen, copies that they've made to Travis's point, and develop and build out their own fabs and they'll find ways to copy the ASML technology.”

“But there is clearly a ton of these chips going into Singapore. I don't think anybody knows where they end up. And the question is, what does America think about that? And why did we implement these export controls in the first place? And if there's a simple back door, how do you want to react?”

“But if China, if one day China has 10 XR power capacity, it won't even matter, right? Because they'll just have so many more, whether they're not quite the same advanced GPUs or not, they'll just have so many more of them. Their industrial AI capacity will be so much larger that even if we have the best H100s and the latest technology that Jensen and others can provide, it won't matter.”

“We saw a model that got released by the Chinese under, by the way, a totally open-source MIT license that you can run on a laptop, and it turned out to be as good as OpenAI's O1 model, so a couple of versions old.”

“By the way, a different version of this, I wrote this in my weekly newsletter, but I was curious why these Chinese models are so good. And I was like, the training of these models seems to be quite fast. The quality of these models are really good, the Alibaba model, et cetera. And part of what you realize is when they do their training runs, the Chinese models have no guardrails in the sense that there's no copyright checks.”

“But you know, NVIDIA's Blackwell chip comes out next year. You're going to have new chips from AMD, new ASICs from Broadcom. And I think at that point, it is not going to be possible for them to keep up anymore”