Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. And it should be obvious. Drugs are banned and illegal in almost every country, yet they reach the US in vast amounts. Why would a ban on GPUs suddenly work - especially since owning a truckload of GPU is perfectly legal in most countries. Smuggling them to where the demand is, is probably easier than smuggling drugs.
It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it.
If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips.
The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite.
> should we investigate? Nah, our donors […]
The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company.
The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt.
Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later.