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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

#561
post #545
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these GPUs being produced in china? Maybe china will ban shipping these to the US?

Nvidia does their main chip fab in Taiwan AFAIK, along with a large number of other companies. It's one of the reasons tensions over Taiwan are worrying. China could blockade or invade Taiwan and start a "shortage" far worse than anything we've seen recently if they decided it was necessary/worthwhile.

Nearly all chip packaging however happens in mainland China. Including presumably for Nvidia's products.

Though Nvidia has probably already sourced some niche provider at a much higher cost elsewhere in anticipation.

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

#562
post #251

This doesn't just ban A100s. It bans those and "any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100." It's a ceiling on the performance that can be exported. In an exponentially scaling industry, this is the equivalent of an announcement in advance of a complete ban on competitive products 2-3…

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.

Truly a surprise change. The new requirements do not appear to be published in the Federal Register, which is a massive screwup that potentially renders the requirements illegal and invalid. My contacts in the trade compliance world are aghast.

Will be interesting to see if Nvidia challenges it.

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

#563
post #318

Won’t this just spur investment in alternatives in those markets and backfire?

Denying the Chinese access to American-designed parts broadens the competitive landscape, by forcing them to compete not just on supply chain, integration, and software, but also on chip design, in order to maintain parity in a key technology area. This is advantageous to the US, or at least it's not as obviously disadvantageous as national competition centered on, say, manufacturing. The US is never going to compete…

[deleted]

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

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of voicing such an opinion with the name immigrant heart...

Yes sir. I take advantage of coming to a generous Western nation filled with opportunity while earning what most people here could only dream. Thank you generous Western nation. I hope my contribution, my taxes, my hard work benefits you. One day I will go back home. I won’t be part of you anymore. When that time comes, I hope you’ll leave us alone in our own affairs and don’t invade us or bomb us anymore. Sincerely,…

I’m glad you’re willing to take the mask off and show your true feelings. It’s really great for everybody in this forum who may have been persuaded by your hateful nativist screed to see what kind of person you truly are.

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

#565
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You would need a lot of capital to do that, where's it coming from and do the people who have it really want to be sanctioned, lose privileges to fly basically anywhere, have bank accounts, or travel anywhere at all? Like everybody involved has to be fine with being airgapped entirely from the western banking system and any allied country or risk quite a long time in prison. Who's got tens or hundreds of million doll…

Gazprombank seems to be doing business fine with western companies and countries, and they have branches in the CIS. So your post seems factually incorrect.

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

#566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the US lost a lot of soft power capabilities over the years, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine really reversed most of those loses in short order. What a blessing in disguise for the United States. For example, you mention that a lot of allies are highly skeptical of how reliable of an ally the US is, but you can see actually that when it came down to it the US was extremely reliable in defending Ukrai…

> And the issue of Taiwan is a linchpin of US hegemony: it's existential, there's no doubt the US will go to war to defend allies in Asia including Taiwan because failure to do so basically kicks the US out of Asia and destroys those alliances. For now it is, the interesting question is if the US voter class is ready to go to war again after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan - at least from an European POV it loo…

Polling, from even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, says that a majority of Americans support defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. After Ukraine, support is probably even higher. Even more, there is strong bipartisan support for it.

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

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre take. The people of Taiwan do not want to share the fate of Hong Kongers and are willing to fight to keep it that way. China imports 10 million barrels of oil a day. Any protracted conflict against the USN will see the CENTCOM stopping that flow of oil, which mostly comes from the Middle East. China is neither food nor energy secure and every additional month of conflict over Taiwan would be absolutely…

The people of Taiwan also don’t want to be bombed and die.

Sounds a lot like Russian thinking about Ukrainian resolve. How’s that working out?

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

#568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the US lost a lot of soft power capabilities over the years, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine really reversed most of those loses in short order. What a blessing in disguise for the United States. For example, you mention that a lot of allies are highly skeptical of how reliable of an ally the US is, but you can see actually that when it came down to it the US was extremely reliable in defending Ukrai…

> And the issue of Taiwan is a linchpin of US hegemony: it's existential, there's no doubt the US will go to war to defend allies in Asia including Taiwan because failure to do so basically kicks the US out of Asia and destroys those alliances. For now it is, the interesting question is if the US voter class is ready to go to war again after the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan - at least from an European POV it loo…

I think many outside of the US misunderstand the impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Outside of political talking points and nightly news, the wars basically didn't exist. I mean if you just turned off the news, you'd have no idea that the US was fighting two wars. The military was at war, but not America. There weren't really any day-to-day effects and to the extent that there were, those are mostly long gone. I don't think that these wars have any bearing on additional US engagement, especially against China or Russia. In other words, I don't think the US is war weary at all, though I do think that out of the issues you mentioned some measure of the population doesn't think they're problems, except high energy prices which I think the US can mostly address domestically. I'd also add from a more realistic standpoint the military isn't preventing fixes for healthcare, poverty, or crumbling infrastructure. What's preventing addressing those issues is that some people don't think they are issues and those that do disagree on how to solve them.

The main threat to the US is dissolution of the democracy, but I think even in that case there would still be strong (maybe even stronger) support for defense of Taiwan because it's an existential issue for the US. For China to invade Taiwan with impunity would dissolve all American credibility in the Pacific and the ramifications of that are significant. It also would kick the US out in terms of trade in favor of China, which would do damage to the US economy.

There certainly is some concern that China may try to engage in a fast, hard engagement with the US and that could cause the US to withdraw, but given the significance of maintaining economic and military interests it's likely that it would just lead to a swift, hard response and from there we're probably in a pretty destructive war. I don't think even Trump or someone similar could prevent a US response here.

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

#569
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.

I worked with a company that upgraded a mainframe cluster not located in the USA. The upgrade topped out a collective rating of that user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes. So, to do the upgrade, US Export controls required the client to decommission some older nodes and that had to be witnessed by US Consular representatives walked through the whole process taking video and photograph…

> user's installed computing power allowance given for civilian purposes

I don't know what this means. Would you explain?

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

#570

This doesn't just ban A100s. It bans those and "any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100." It's a ceiling on the performance that can be exported. In an exponentially scaling industry, this is the equivalent of an announcement in advance of a complete ban on competitive products 2-3…

One way that companies get around ITAR and similar regulations for things like space grade components that have radiation tolerant features is to only rad test up to what the limits are. The components are probably much more resilient than what they are specced for but by only declaring the legal limit, companies can still export their products. The foreign buyers can do their own testing to prove the components can…

This could work for GPUs: Instead of selling a 20 TFLOP card for $500 you could sell 2 for $250 each consuming half the power. Wonder how long you could keep this up with exponential scaling though...
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