US Issues Warning To Nvidia, Urging To Stop Redesigning Chips For China (fortune.com) 86
At the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, on Saturday, US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo issued a cautionary statement to Nvidia, urging them to stop redesigning AI chips for China that maneuver around export restrictions. "We cannot let China get these chips. Period," she said. "We're going to deny them our most cutting-edge technology." Fortune reports: Raimondo said American companies will need to adapt to US national security priorities, including export controls that her department has placed on semiconductor exports. "I know there are CEOs of chip companies in this audience who were a little cranky with me when I did that because you're losing revenue," she said. "Such is life. Protecting our national security matters more than short-term revenue."
Raimondo called out Nvidia Corp., which designed chips specifically for the Chinese market after the US imposed its initial round of curbs in October 2022. "If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day," Raimondo said. Communication with China can help stabilize ties between the two countries, but "on matters of national security, we've got to be eyes wide open about the threat," she said. "This is the biggest threat we've ever had and we need to meet the moment," she said. Further reading: Nvidia CEO Says US Will Take Years To Achieve Chip Independence
Raimondo called out Nvidia Corp., which designed chips specifically for the Chinese market after the US imposed its initial round of curbs in October 2022. "If you redesign a chip around a particular cut line that enables them to do AI, I'm going to control it the very next day," Raimondo said. Communication with China can help stabilize ties between the two countries, but "on matters of national security, we've got to be eyes wide open about the threat," she said. "This is the biggest threat we've ever had and we need to meet the moment," she said. Further reading: Nvidia CEO Says US Will Take Years To Achieve Chip Independence
Re:What's to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
China is much more business friendly with much fewer restrictions and lower taxation. I'm not sure why you'd manufacture anything in the US.
One major reason is rule of law in intellectual and corporate property. Musk, for all the pain he caused to the current administration, is still free and still in control of his assets. In China under similar circumstances, he would have been disappeared and his companies ownership transferred long time ago. Just look at what happened to Jack Ma (Chinese Bezos).
Re:What's to stop (Score:5, Informative)
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The Twitter Files that Musk's own corporate attorneys [cnn.com] argued in court that there was no government coersion and no campaign to censor content on behalf of any party?
The court ruling that an appeals court of three Republican appointees later pared down [reuters.com] to only ban explicitly illegal activity?
The Starlink issue was definitely a problem, though. You can't have private citizens making your foreign policy for you. The Defense Production Act probably should have been invoked long ago.
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I think it's also fair to add that Musk and Biden were clashing on ideological grounds from the very beginning. With Biden right off the bat starting a gaslighting campaign pretending that Tesla didn't exist and that GM (which at the time wasn't producing any EVs) was the world-leader in EV production - a campaign so absurd that even major Tesla critics were starting to call it out. And meanwhile Musk continuously radicalized (to the point that today he's even plugging Pizzagate, though it was a gradual p
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The Twitter Files that Musk's own corporate attorneys argued in court that there was no government coersion and no campaign to censor content on behalf of any party?
That's not what they argued at all. Twitter's lawyers argued that (a) Elon Musk made Twitter reinstate the three accounts in question, so the claims were moot, (b) the new evidence addressed did not demonstrate that government set forth "any state-created right or rule of conduct" that caused Twitter to censor those three accounts, and (c) the Court had already ruled in Twitter's favor on basically the same argument.
Your are just as confused about the social media-related restrictions; the whole question i
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Yes, it is, and yes, we can read [courtlistener.com]. The article I linked previously includes a number of choice quotes, but the entire argument of the filing is that there was no government cooersion at all in Twitter's actions and both Twitter and the government behaved properly and in an even-handed manner.
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The article you linked before was an activist opinion piece with a bunch of context-free quotes that contradict what you claimed the filing and the opinion piece said. You were farther than CNN from what the filing actually says.
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that Musk's own corporate attorneys argued in court that there was no government coersion ...
However there was willing collusion by social media. Which in effect makes social media censors agents of the government so the first amendment may now apply. Much like willing police informant are agents of the government and laws related to entrapment now apply. In short government may not outsource violating constitutional rights.
... and no campaign to censor content on behalf of any party?
"Party" is misdirection, they were censoring on behalf of authorities in power. Disagree with a government policy, say a member of government is wrong on some fact, and you cou
Re:What's to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
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Jack Ma? Bao Fan is missing right now.
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i recognise that sig anywhere AC
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The US absolutely gets to lecture US companies about US law.
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Re:What's to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
Nvidia from giving the finger to the US and packing up and moving to China? That's what I would do if I was threatened by the Biden administration.
How about the possibility of Biden sanctioning the CEO and everyone in the board, and confiscating all their assets? Is that's enough to give you pause?
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I don't think you've thought your position through.
What's to stop? Replacing CEO and maybe Board (Score:2)
So the rest of the world will have Nvidia chips but the US won't?
No, so that everyone except China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea can have Nvidia chips.
Basically the US government could freeze Nvidia's operations for exporting illegally to China and keep things in court until Nvidia's stockholders replace the CEO and Board of Directors. Assuming the Board of Directors does not replace the CEO for not taking US gov't threats seriously.
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Here's a novel idea, how about enforcing the EAR rules as written?
A blanket declaration of "Whatever you sell, I'm going to prohibit it" is bullshit. Our government simply does not have right to operate that way.
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Yup. What the USG has done here is a bit like:
USG: The speed limit is set at 55mph.
nVidia: OK, we'll keep to the set speed limit.
USG: But you're not supposed to do that! We want you to not drive at all!
Re:What's to stop (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't want to ban consumer card sales ("not drive at all", in your situation); they want to ban server card sales ("highway speeds", in your analogy), for model training. Their expectation was that NVidia would follow the intent of the law, rather than immediately setting out to create a new product line just millimeters from the edge.
If NVidia isn't careful, however, there will be no edge. The rule will become, "you're not allowed to drive at all", with the consumer market cut off as well.
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arglebargle said "55mph", not "highway speeds", for a reason. These rules need to be objectively set so that companies know whether they are complying, and "highway speeds" is subjective.
And once the government goes through its rule-making process, private entities are entitled to rely on it. Nvidia could challenge a new, lower limit in court. They might not win, but they would say last have a strong argument.
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Their expectation was that NVidia would follow the intent of the law
That's not how this works. Everybody reading this needs to spend a few minutes surfing through the Commerce Control List [doc.gov] sometime. The analogy to a numerical speed limit is spot-on. Either a product falls into a certain ECCN category, or it does not. There is no other way to conduct an export business. If your business exports products from the US, it literally lives and dies by the CCL.
Raimondo needs to be hauled into court to explai
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Well then their would be a lawsuit and everything China Joe did gets thrown out as illegal.
Erm no, the illegal part would be the circumvention of sanctions in the first place, what "China Joe" would be doing is ... what has typically always been done to punish those circumventing sanctions.
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Biden is a truly terrible president, possibly almost as bad as Trump.
But name calling is a fool's errand.
How can you expect anyone to respect someone who uses name calling as their trump card. I hope you're worth more than that.
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Nvidia from giving the finger to the US and packing up and moving to China? That's what I would do if I was threatened by the Biden administration.
Just off the top of my head? The fact that cryptocurrencies are basically banned in China but Nvidia is still riding that wave to its greatest market successes ever.
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The official policy of the United States is that Taiwan is already part of China: https://www.state.gov/u-s-rela... [state.gov]
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"We do not support Taiwan independence."
That is a direct quote from the link I provided. Independence from whom?
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The link is the official US Department of State's web site defining US relations with Taiwan.
But of course you don't care. That's the reason nobody on the planet should ever trust our word on anything. They're finally noticing.
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That said, even two China does not fully acknowledge Chinese authority, for example re-unification with the mainland is ONLY recognized if it is voluntary.
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This isn't diplomatic talk, it's official policy negotiated with China decades ago. China is pretty clear on the issue, Taiwan is part of China. "One China"?. Your double-talk and wink, wink, nudge, nudge (oh we're just lying to you) is what the rest of the world has pretty much had enough of.
One China does not say Taiwan part of CCP (Score:2)
This isn't diplomatic talk, it's official policy negotiated with China decades ago. China is pretty clear on the issue, Taiwan is part of China. "One China"?. Your double-talk and wink, wink, nudge, nudge (oh we're just lying to you) is what the rest of the world has pretty much had enough of.
Diplomatic speech is a manifestation of policy. Policy is not negotiated with China, China did not agree that re-unification by force is not allowed. Policy is the direction mandated by the executive administration, ie the President.
The "One China" policy is officially described as "strategic ambiguity". It "acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China" and "does not challenge that position."
https://en.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org]
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You realize he's Chinese, right?
a) he's not. b) being Chinese doesn't mean you're automatically suicidal or as incapable of basic logic as you are.
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That's what I would do if I was threatened by the Biden administration.
And that's why you only run your mouth rather than running a business. There's many things stopping NVIDIA from packing up and moving, not the least of which is you will quickly find yourself no longer the CEO and instead replaced by the board with someone who doesn't take silly expensive high risk kneejerk decisions that upend decades of corporate development.
It's hard enough for you *YOU YOURSELF*, one person, to simply pick up and move to another country. Doing so with a giant company has devastating con
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I love internet tough guys. It's like you two nerds are fight over which is better, Mountain Dew or Code Red. Hint: they both taste like cat piss.
Pointing out someone is an idiot when it comes to fundamental short-sightedness doesn't make me tough. On the other hand what have you contributed to the conversation?
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After all, Europe is already a bigger economic block than America.
OK, American refugees would have to learn to use metres and degC. But if you're talking about hardware and software engineers, designers etc, that's probably likely to be one of the smaller of micro-hurdles to get over.
who is in charge then (Score:3)
Re: who is in charge then (Score:3)
That is not asking
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Re:who is in charge then (Score:5, Insightful)
US can ask, nobody needs to comply.
Yeah ... that's not how sanctions work.
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Companies try to follow that logic though. Thankfully, most of the laws are such that breaking them results in a worse outcome than following them. If breaking a law earns you $10k, but you are fined $100k, then it does not make sense to break the law.
OTOH, if breaking the law earns you $1M, but you are fined $100k, then it is very profitable to break the law.
If breaking the law lands the CEO in prison, then the CEO will be unwilling to do it, even if the shareholders may like it.
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It's an existential threat to Nvidia. China is a huge and growing market, and Chinese companies are developing GPUs at a rapid pace. The last time Gamer's Nexus tested one, it was a few generations behind the latest AMD and Nvidia parts, but a dramatic improvement over previous Chinese GPUs, and in supported games the performance was actually quite usable.
Nvidia's secret weapon is that they provide a lot of proprietary tooling along with their GPUs, for AI and stuff like raytracing in games. That locks comp
Duh. (Score:1)
Hey Nvidia, don't be so blatant next time (Score:4, Informative)
Instead of offering a 4090 "D" variant and saying that it's only for China, release a slightly cheaper "4080 Super" model and make it available to everyone.
If it just happens to be slightly below the maximum TPP for Chinese export, that's just a coincidence, right? NVidia was going to planning on releasing this GPU anyway, because it still LOVES its core gaming customers and obviously isn't trying to make another blantant cash grab with the AI gold rush like it did before with crypto mining :)
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Depending on how quickly China can steal/clone the tools needed to make chips and make the photomasks needed for production, there will come a "next time" where Nvidia has an unofficial branch in China making full-blown chips running at full power.
The Chinese market is larger than the US market, and because the technology exported to China is crippleware, if they can move to in-country production, the significance of any upgrade will be much greater. That will be in the minds of chipmakers dealing with US p
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On what process? China's "next-gen" domestic semiconductor manufacturing is 14nm, while current gen is 19-28nm. By contrast, NVidia's H100 is 4nm.
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I think East Germany is a cautionary tale. They decided they were going to be a microelectronics powerhouse, and dedicated huge national resources toward it. They sought to achieve it by copying and stealing massively, and they were really good at doing so - not just getting designs, but actual pieces of production hardware. What they weren't good at doing, it turned out, was doing actual microelectronics manufacturing - indeed, their efforts to do so greatly contributed to the dire economic situation th
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I completely agree that the USSR and East Germany botched it for the reasons you gave. I'd add micromanaging as well, although I suspect that this was tightly coupled to the corruption.
(I do not expect India to become a world-class economy for the same reason. Corruption is endemic there, which is one reason that their cheapo pill factories have quite the reputation of churning out deadly products.)
China scores 45 on the corruption index and ranks 65th. The USA scored 69 and is 24th, Taiwan scored 68 and is
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You apparently think regulators are morons.
They've tried to carve out a hole for NVidia to continue to sell consumer cards to China. If NVidia is clearly abusing it, that hole will be closed on them, and it won't be anyone's fault but their own.
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That's kind of the point of what I was saying, though. Instead of blatantly dodging the Chinese export restriction, NVidia should actually release a new 4000 series card that people actually want. Right now, there is a big price and performance gap between the $1,200 4080 and the $2,000+ 4090 that a "4080 Super" or "4080 Ti" product could fill.
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I can only speak for myself, but I'm only in the market for 3090s until they either add NVLink back or increase the VRAM. As far as I'm concerned, 4090 is a downgrade as far as my needs go.
Trying to stop China... (Score:2)
...from acquiring tech is futile and counterproductive
They will get what they need on the black market
Even worse, what happens if they develop something WE need
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From the black market for now, but they're rapidly learning how to clone the technology. At some point, they will be self-sufficient, save for occasionally needing to steal plans for upgrades. If they succeed in stealing or cloning the Deep UV chipmaking tools, they won't have any need for anything made in the US. And the US is giving the Chinese plenty of reasons to follow such a path.
RISC-V is open source and is looking to replace all of the custom processors currently out there through the use of custom
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If that were true, why would they be buying for NVIDIA at all?
Who didn't see this coming? (Score:2)
You mean our system that encourages rabidly capitalist companies is being gamed by rabidly capitalist companies?
[surprised Pikachu face]
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The problem won't just be Nvidia gaming the system, China is working hard to take the US out of the loop and to reduce the dependency on European equipment manufacturers. Either through innovation or outright theft. (Pretty much what the US did in the late 19th century, early 20th century.)
Sooner or later, Nvidia will be able to simply make the highest-end gear in China. And if they don't, the Chinese will simply steal the designs and make the chips themselves. Nvidia isn't stupid and will find a way to tak
confused (Score:1)
US makes a ban list, Nvidia stop selling some stuff in China but sells other stuff not on the ban list. Then US complains Nvidia should not sell some of that stuff. I don't understand the problem, of course Nvidia want sales and will sell stuff not on the ban list, why the ban was not more inclusive?
China's chip industry (Score:2, Troll)
China are building everything needed for chip making, to take the US out of the loop. They already have extensive facilities and this will only increase. Meanwhile, America is struggling to build just one cutting-edge fab plant and can't make any of the Deep UV gear themselves.
In the meantime, capitalists will evaluate whose markets are the larger and where the best returns are for stockholders, they're just not going to care about international rivalry.
If China can fabricate the chips Nvidia wants, in the
Regulators are naive (Score:2)
While to the average person this regulator sounds like he's bullish on national security, to those who know either computer science, engineering, or even tool and die work, he sounds rather naive. In the first place, a ban on selling Nvidia chips to China won't prevent China from acquiring them, and in the second place, selling them chips won't help China make them.
The process of lithography for producing chips is by this time well understood. When I built my lathe from scratch, the most amazing part o
She just wants more money (Score:2)
Like if a $200 million budget wasn't enough already to stop Nvidia from exporting AI chips to China.
If they really want to stop that from happening, they could add AI chips to an ITAR-like list directed to China and allies and force AI chips maker to request a license for every chip model they want to export to those countries.
Measure twice, cut once (Score:2)
As an American, I can't help but feel that this is going to bite us in the future. China has a metric assload of PhDs graduating every year. Eventually they are going to invent a better mousetrap and we're going to be apologizing, hat in hand.
They are only spending about 20% less on R&D than the US, and money goes a LOT farther in China than it does here.
Wait, I thought we were against 'big government'? (Score:2)
Or do we hate China more now?
If you're a conservative, I guess it's much easier if you don't try to think for yourself.
US is sentient now? (Score:2)