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US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

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Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#281

Post by nomel »

rvnx wrote: post #152
nomel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you describe how this works? What if a company in Kazakhstan buys them and then ships them to Russia? How would the US "charge" a Kazakhstan company? Is it AMD that would be charged? Would AMD be liable for every card they sold? How many levels of misdirection until they're liable? I know nothing about this.

There is a weird extraterritoriality concept that essentially says that if you use USD to commit a crime (they have the buy cards in USD at the beginning), that you can be prosecuted in the US, even if you are not from the US. "any company or individual can be investigated, charged and sentenced because of a remote link with US jurisdiction, such as a transaction in US dollars, the existence of a subsidiary onto US t…

People in other countries don't use USD to buy Nvidia GPUs, do they? Does Nvidia only accept USD? I would assume they would have somewhat independent foreign markets set up.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#282

Post by zerohp »

LionTamer wrote: post #264
zerohp wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US government has been setting the ceiling on performance that can be exported since the beginning of the computer industry. This is not really new but NVidia was caught by a surprise change in the limits.

When was this done previously?

You can go down the rabbit hole at federalregister.gov. Here's a couple places where they talk about it:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/subtitle-B/chapter-VII... https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2006/04/24/06-3647...

You'll probably have to dig quite a bit to find the latest rules and regulations.

These regulations go back to at least the Export Control Act of 1968. Every CPU/GPU maker would have a legal team that understands these rules.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#284

Post by ajross »

sudosysgen wrote: post #109
ajross wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you're really trying to do. Having to pay that putative 30% markup on hardware is going to be a crippling disadvantage for a China-based AI product, for example.

It's also going to be a 30% additional discount on Chinese TPU equivalent chips, especially since they have 7nm production now. I foresee it backfiring.

That depends on how SMIC's ramp goes. Right now they're shipping what amount to samples only. And even then there's no chips to fab absent more development work. Making a ML accelerator is hard. If AMD and Intel (actually Google and Tesla seem closer) can't beat NVIDIA, you really think Goodix is going to get it done?

High tech is still high tech for a reason. Sure, in the long term China is going to get there eventually. But in the intermediate decade or two, there's plenty of time for trade sanctions to work to shape markets.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#285

Post by nomel »

colechristensen wrote: post #190
nomel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you describe how this works? What if a company in Kazakhstan buys them and then ships them to Russia? How would the US "charge" a Kazakhstan company? Is it AMD that would be charged? Would AMD be liable for every card they sold? How many levels of misdirection until they're liable? I know nothing about this.

It really depends on circumstances which are always complicated. An example: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-judge-rule... ZTE, a Chinese company, was blacklisted for years and paid something like a billion dollars for evading US sanctions. It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy. If you really don't want to do business with us, you probably want to bank with banks that hav…

> It is really quite hard to not have connections to the US economy.

I'm not sure I understand. AI startups are everywhere. It seems it would be trivial to set up a Kazakhstan AI "startup", buy a bunch, then ship them to Russia/China. Or are you saying that any non-governmental entity that would be interested in these would also be interested in the US market? And, someone friendly to the US would eventually peek in their server room and rat them out?

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#287

Post by immigrantheart »

chii wrote: post #214
immigrantheart wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with being in the same cell is eventually one wants to smoke and one hates smoke. Everyone should just be in their own cell, and we can do whatever we want. We can still play card game and talk. China is the only old civilization that still strive today. As a country, they are really big. It takes tremendous amount of leadership to bring China to what it is today. Yes the memes about China are true, like…

> China is the only old civilization that still strive today. i doubt that is actually true - the old chinese civilization is long gone. It's like saying that the american indian civilization is still here today. > they still made great progress they did - and to obtain that progress, they had to open up to world trade, to become part of the international community, and to cooperate. It's proof that free market and i…

> i doubt that is actually true - the old chinese civilization is long gone. It's like saying that the american indian civilization is still here today.

Native American Indian didn't speak English, got obliterated by European settlers, their culture and their language destroyed. The American Indians have zero continuity today. They are a lost people. The Chinese was and still is the same, the Han. Despite Mongol and Japan's invasion, they still retained their culture, their buildings, their language, and their genetic make up.

> they did - and to obtain that progress, they had to open up to world trade, to become part of the international community, and to cooperate.

> It's proof that free market and international trade is not zero sum, and that all parties benefit.

I agree. Hence why they showed that a nation can become strong without forcing diversity. They just stick to their own self, their own culture, and generally absorb world's technology, research, and information. In today's free flow of information, we don't need diversity and multiculturalism.

Although, I argue that diversity and multiculturalism has zero correlation with why US is a strong nation. US is a strong nation simply because this land is abundant, rich, has a lot of river, geographically advantageous, and largely left alone when the whole world was fighting.

> But now that progress has been made, the chinese gov't seems to want to usurp more - both politically as well as economically. They desire the advances that their western trade partners enjoy, but don't desire the political freedom, and self-determination that would also come with such advances.

Yeah, I can understand why the Chinese govt want that. If I were the Chinese govt, I would think the same too. If I were an average Chinese citizen, I'd want the opposite.

> I think the US is not in a good strategic position to overcome china economically, unfortunately. The fact that the US has resorted to politically motivated bans like that is a clear sign. And china has progressed enough that i dont believe such bans will be effective at all - at most it will slow down the progress by about a couple years.

Yeah, totally agree.

Re: US Government Bans Export of Nvidia A100 and H100 GPUs to China and Russia

#288

Post by ericmay »

butterfly771 wrote: post #273
alphabetting wrote: post #72

To me this is a pretty clear message that the US will defend Taiwan with full force.

As a Chinese, what I want to say is that populism here has risen rapidly in recent years, the Thucydides trap has been fulfilled again, and a war is basically inevitable. is the United States determined to deal with this earth war? How much are you willing to pay to protect Taiwan?

Wars happen because each of the two sides think they can win.

In this case, the US is obviously confident it can win. This one is easy to see in this scenario.

China on the other hand questions the commitment of the US: “really, you’re going to go to war to protect Taiwan? It’s China! What do you care?”, and this could be true if geographic and geopolitical realities were different.

But what the CCP somewhat and I think many Chinese citizens misunderstand is that Taiwan isn’t just some island. Taiwan is a crucial linchpin to all of America’s presence and legitimacy in Asia.

So for China (more so Chinese citizens) it’s just some island that belongs to China anyway. Of course China would win and take over because Americans don’t really want to fight or think they can win right?

There lies the miscalculation that leads to the war. It’s not about Taiwan the island, it’s about existential foreign policy for America. The US is extremely determined to maintain the status quo. China misunderstands this and thinks that an invasion over Taiwan won’t lead to an actual war because they don’t understand what the war is about.

Note: When I say China, I mean people who question whether the U.S. is determined to fight a war over Taiwan. Certainly main Chinese including leadership in the CCP understand what’s at stake, which is why they haven’t undertaken an invasion as of yet.

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