News Despite sanctions, Chinese military, universities, and government bodies procure Nvidia GPUs.

[Admin]

Chinese Military and Government Organizations Can Still Procure AI and HPC GPUs from Nvidia, Despite Stricter Export Rules.

Despite sanctions, Chinese military, universities, and government bodies procure Nvidia GPUs. : Read more

 

[ingwe13]

The goal of sanctions is generally to limit/slow/waste resources/increase prices. So some supply getting through does not mean that the sanctions are ineffective--though they may be. The article just doesn't have enough information to assess that.

 

[hotaru251]

again Sanctions don't really "stop" anything. It just makes official channels unable to sell directly to them and they will just go through 3rd party at increased costs.

 

[bit_user]

As I've said before, sanctions of any mass-market product are going to be leaky. I think it's a foregone conclusion they got some of these GPUs. However, that doesn't mean the sanctions are worthless!

The question we should be considering is how many more they'd have without the sanctions, and whether the difference is meaningful.

From the conclusion:

The U.S. strategy, according to Miller, is not to completely block China's access to these chips but to hinder the development of its AI capabilities by making it difficult to build large clusters based on advanced processors.

Exactly. If the biggest breaches are like 6x A100's here and 80x A100's there, that's actually not bad if it takes 10,000 to train a GPT-3 sized model.

 

[bit_user]

again Sanctions don't really "stop" anything.

In fact, the details of the article seem to contradict you, on this point. Depending on what proportion of total sales their sample represents, it could indicate the sanctions are being quite effective.

From another recent article, we can see just how big a hole the sanctions helped create. That's quite a gap to fill by "fell of a truck" grey-market imports.

" ... the chips that China didn't buy in 2023 were particularly valuable. This likely reflects U.S. sanctions on China, which prevents it from buying top-end graphics cards, especially from Nvidia."

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-i...ue-to-us-sanctions-and-globally-weaker-demand
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[ex_bubblehead]

We shouldn't have to continually warn about this but it seems that some members simply refuse to comply.

Keep politics of ANY kind out of these forums. Failure to comply will result in closure of the thread and possible sanctions to the violator/s.

 

[LabRat 891]

Sanctions do 1 thing, and 1 thing very well:
Increase (relative) demand.

I am unsurprised.


Wake me up when the mainland's fab capabilities exceeds the island's
(Should be a short nap, with this kind of 'pressure')

 

[digitalgriffin]

Nvidia could force remote qualifications activation. This is a similar technique used by Intel to allow consumers to upgrade their processors and activate latent cache and cores.

Anything with a bad ip address that can't be tied to a qualified business would be black listed.

 

[ThomasKinsley]

The supply chain is so extensive and unregulated that it's inevitable China will obtain them.

 

[das_stig]

Surprised Nvidia hasn't included a secret kill switch.

 

[purpleduggy]

everything has a price. sanctions just mean more middlemen. so all the US is doing is enriching some middlemen. if anyone knows anything about how government procurement works, an increase in price make very little difference. they'll just pay more. what the US should do instead is work together with China to Research and Develop semiconductors. There is no need for this. All it does is increase prices and limit Nvidia sales. Markets should be open and encouraged.

 

[bit_user]

The supply chain is so extensive and unregulated that it's inevitable China will obtain them.

They're mostly concerned about the server GPUs, which have a very different and more constrained supply chain than consumer GPUs.

Server GPUs are the ones that really count, because they have enough I/O bandwidth & connectivity that you can combine them to train really large models.

 

[bit_user]

what the US should do instead is work together with China to Research and Develop semiconductors.

And we should all join hands and sing.

View: https://youtu.be/1VM2eLhvsSM?t=26
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In reality, there are things happening in the world (and that might happen) which are potentially of grave concern.

Markets should be open and encouraged.

Cooperation requires certain ground rules be agreed upon and upheld. Markets can't properly function without some sort of ground rules.

 

[Colin Ionita]

Markets should be open and encouraged.

only when the other markets are free and open. China might be opening up, but its still a command economy where the Government can directly interfere with little regard for normal and fair market practices. The Yuan is a perfect example, it is forces a arbitrary exchange rate that doesn't reflect its actual market value. How can you do fair trade when the other parties currency isnt reflecting its market value. The chip tariffs are just the beginning of the pain coming to china for refusing to participate in a open market honestly, there only more to come to level the playing field.

 

[purpleduggy]

And we should all join hands and sing.

​

View: https://youtu.be/1VM2eLhvsSM?t=26​

​

In reality, there are things happening in the world (and that might happen) which are potentially of grave concern.


Cooperation requires certain ground rules be agreed upon and upheld. Markets can't properly function without some sort of ground rules.

that's a great coca cola ad. thanks for that.

 

[purpleduggy]

only when the other markets are free and open. China might be opening up, but its still a command economy where the Government can directly interfere with little regard for normal and fair market practices. The Yuan is a perfect example, it is forces a arbitrary exchange rate that doesn't reflect its actual market value. How can you do fair trade when the other parties currency isnt reflecting its market value. The chip tariffs are just the beginning of the pain coming to china for refusing to participate in a open market honestly, there only more to come to level the playing field.

im not concerned about this at all. i just care about lowering costs for my hardware for everyone and this requires removing sanctions. the ethical market considerations are not my problem.

 

[bit_user]

i just care about lowering costs for my hardware for everyone and this requires removing sanctions. the ethical market considerations are not my problem.

I'm also not concerned about ethics, in this context. I'm concerned about the long term market health, which often sits in tension with short-term benefits.