[Aldo_MX]

This restriction makes no sense.

The US says "18 countries may purchase our AI chips", but what I understand is "90% of the world may purchase Chinese AI chips".

China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

[cookiemonsieur]

It doesn't even matter at this point. As evidenced by DeepSeek. A growing portion of the world is distancing themselves from the west, and It's a good thing. People should have the ability to choose who they do business with without a third party strongarming them.

[cocoggu]

Can you please explain to me why AI chips don't matters anymore because of DeepSeek? I thought it was just a better model, but perhaps I didn't get it?

[dathinab]

well I mean the US itself distanced itself from the west

depending on your definition of what "the west" means

or it doubled down on what "the west" means, if you take different and in which case the EU is slowly moving away from "the west"

either way using "the west" to lump together EU+US+Canada+Australia+... seems to be becoming increasingly meaningless

[genewitch]

Per HN guidelines, that "just" is load bearing.

[jjallen]

What does Taiwan have to do with this? Because it’s a US ally China could get GPUs through Taiwan if china invaded Taiwan?

Maybe old ones if this is what you are saying.

[dathinab]

Most bleeding edge chip manufacturing is currently done in Taiwan, Taiwan has both the machinery and know how to produce state of the art AI training chips. And while they are not quite at NVIDIAs knowledge about chip design by far the largest source of performance differences between NVIDIA and China based completion is the manufacturing not the design (which still is better, but not to the margin where it's not something you can somewhat "good enough" bridge by "throwing more money and (electric)power at it", for the manufacturing differences on the other hand "throwing money/(electric)power at it" to bridge the gap isn't viable. The difference is to big.).

Through then if we are realistic both Taiwan and the US did take measurements to make sure the even if China attacks Taiwan and wins they aren't getting their hands on this tech.

Except Taiwan would have been not very clever if they didn't try to find ways to work around this, so that they are a lever to negotiate in case the US abandons them... (it's unclear if they did find ways tho).

[Aldo_MX]

I said "infiltrate" as in "send their best engineers as undercover agents to work at TSMC".

[nisten]

It makes perfect sense if they're laundering Russian assets to circumvent US Sanctions.

[iforgot22]

Isn't this going to erode Nvidia's CUDA advantage? I thought that was way more important than their hardware.

[iforgot22]

Well seems Deepseek still used CUDA at least

[sofixa]

> China just needs to infiltrate Taiwan, which is geographically and culturally closer than the US.

Taiwan is China. Their official name is the Republic of China, and they're the remnants of the losers from the civil war that ran away go to an island and assimilated the locals. They still officially claim to be "the one and only real" China. For Americans, think it the Confederation ran away to Puerto Rico (assuming it used to be American before being occupied by Spain for a few years, before they went there) and was still there.

But today Taiwan is de facto independent. More and more of its people consider themselves Taiwanese, not "the real" China. Ideally, they should be left to self-determinate. Unfortunately China (PRC) considers itself to be the one and only real China too, and wants all of it. And it would consider Taiwan, with which it has a lot of bad blood (its former dictator literally preferred fighting the Communists over defending over the Japanese that were invading and committing mass atrocities; and he started all that with multiple purges of anyone left aligned), becoming "independent"/separate as a big humiliation. But they also know that any war will probably result in TSMC being sabotaged, so it might be all for nothing, economically. The question is will they risk it for "prestige".

[dathinab]

> Taiwan is China.

This is a sever case of word nit-picking and misinterpretation.

When (western) people say China they mean "China (PRC)" _never_ Taiwan and pretending they don't isn't helping anyone.

And just because two countries have the same root in a civil war of a past now gone country which both claim to succeed doesn't mean they are the same country. Nor is today's China the same country as idk. China during the Ming dynasty. Yes they are political successor, yes they use the same name, but no they aren't politically the same country if we really nit-pick. I mean if they where then we also would need to treat Austia and Hungary as the same country. Or say the BRD (i.e. today's Germany) is the same country as the 3rd Reich, Weimar Repulic and the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation. They are all predecessors of Germany, Germany has to take responsibility for some of it's past predecessors, too. But they aren't the same country from a political nit-picking POV. Same for Russia and the UDSSR etc. etc.

And yes it's complicated as both countries still claim sovereignty over the territory of each other. But for Taiwan that is ironically more to appease China, i.e. dropping that claim would signal Taiwan trying to finally fully break away from China (PCR) which China would never allow.

[genewitch]

Are the machines German or am I misremembering? The ones in the video were maybe 14nm and I vaguely recall the machines being manufactured in Germany and flown and assembled for TSMC.

I know, for example, that Motorola and Texas instruments know how to fab, and a dire shortage would be things like 680x0 and 6502 and 386 (see intel quark for the state of 386/486 processors a decade ago...) And ideally there'd be national RISC-V chips or something idk let's keep it fun.

[tgv]

The bad blood is mutual. Mao's armies stood aside while the NRA tried to hold off the Japanese, with the sole intention of weakening the NRA. They could have prevented several blood baths.