Trump Will Rescind Biden-Era AI Chip Export Curbs (reuters.com) 63
According to Bloomberg, the Trump administration plans to revise a set of chip trade restrictions called the "AI diffusion" rule, which were scheduled to take effect on May 15. CNBC reports: The rule, which was proposed in the last days of the Biden administration, organizes countries into three different tiers, all of which have different restrictions on whether advanced AI chips like those made by Nvidia, AMD, and Intel can be shipped to the country without a license.
Chipmakers including Nvidia and AMD have been against the rule. AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC on Wednesday that the U.S. should strike a balance between restricting access to chips for national security and providing access, which will boost the American chip industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this week that being locked out of the Chinese AI market would be a "tremendous loss."
Chipmakers including Nvidia and AMD have been against the rule. AMD CEO Lisa Su told CNBC on Wednesday that the U.S. should strike a balance between restricting access to chips for national security and providing access, which will boost the American chip industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this week that being locked out of the Chinese AI market would be a "tremendous loss."
concept of a plan (Score:3)
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See, that is the plan. We are not going to ban exporting the chips to them. No. We are going to put a big beautiful tariff on them. And China is going to pay. Oh they are going to pay. They have been very unfair to us. Very unfair. A massive trade deficit. If they don't pay up, we will close the store. It's our store. We can choose what to sell in it. No little girl 11 or 9, or 15 needs 37 dolls. 2 or 3 is fine. And pencils? They don't need 250 pencils.
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Trump's the only one who can save us.
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promise?
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Some people paid for access to Trump, and he obliged them by lifting the restrictions on their businesses. He doesn't even bother trying to make it look like a policy shift or a plan, he just gives them what they paid for.
I thought there were shortages? (Score:4, Insightful)
I feel like all we hear about are shortages and backlogs for high end graphics and dedicated AI chips- so where is all this extra export capacity going to come from?
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The more we ban chips to other countries, the more and cheaper the chips for us.
Re:I thought there were shortages? (Score:5, Informative)
Just like the price of pork fell when China stopped buying from us the last time. Or how beef prices plummeted. Same with all that wine and whiskey Canada is no longer buying.
For those wondering, yes, this is sarcasm.
Re: I thought there were shortages? (Score:2)
They're in demand, if you were producing them, why wouldn't you sit on current inventory a little bit and cut production to meet the new, lower volume. IDK, that's what I would do in Sim Chip Fab anyway, but anything's possible.
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Re: I thought there were shortages? (Score:2)
the reason there are "shortages" is that the production is a monopoly, which is keepibg the output where its profits are highest, and not where it is economically optimal.
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Geopolitics (Score:2)
Someone should tell routers.com that China has been put on the list of hostile nations by NATO.
If you misbehave, no chips for you.
HaHa
-- Nelson
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So, how will this stop China from getting US chips?
Another question would be, how will this stop China from building its own chips that are as good or better than what the US could sell to them?
If they aren't there already, they are certainly on their way. Their government still believes in growth through supporting advances in science and technology, so their science and technology is going to advance. Our government believes in growth through artificially handicapping all our competitors, which will work about as well now as it ever did in the past.
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So, how will this stop China from getting US chips?
Another question would be, how will this stop China from building its own chips that are as good or better than what the US could sell to them?
I've heard this argument before, but it doesn't make that much sense to me because it implies that the Chinese are either too lazy or unmotivated without drastic economic attacks from the US, or maybe the Chinese are not smart enough to surpass the US without US motivation.
My suspicion is that building GPUs better than Nvidia's is hard and that motivation wasn't a problem the Chinese had. I don't believe that all American companies are so inept that they can't surpass Nvidia (or at least haven't shown that
Re: Geopolitics (Score:2)
Building your own is hard, but it isn't what's stopping China. What is is the "comparative advantage". If China can source the chips cheaply elsewhere, it has more resources to do other important things with the savings.
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routers.com
With this design I'm more likely to believe the owners of this site died 20 years before any concerns about Chinese IT products, but the copyright notice is recent and the domain would have long ago expired.
But think of the (Score:2)
China is catching up and will eventually be a world leader.
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You need to research that story a bit more carefully. DeepSeek was impressive, but it was trained on fancy chips. Chips that were imported before there was any ban.
Now this doesn't mean that China won't catch up reasonably quickly, but that particular story was highly overblown.
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Anyone who tells you the Chinese are less smart than Americans or too underdeveloped as a country to compete is lying to your face. In this case, they used what was available, and they will continue to do so. You can restrict all the "fancy" chips you like, they will develop competitive systems that make use of restricted resources nonetheless.
How do I know? Because nature has already built AI, and the na
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How do I know? Because nature has already built AI, and the natural AI organisms are many orders of magnitude more energy efficient and training data efficient than systems using Nvidia hardware. That shows that beating OpenAI brute force designs without "fancy" H800 chips and without gobbling all the words on the Internet for human mimicry is certainly possible. In Science, knowing that something is actually possible is half the battle won.
This makes no sense. These brains you mention have been around for many thousands of years. If the existence of such advanced brains foretell the advent of similarly advanced electronic systems, why didn't these advanced electronic systems appear thousands of years ago.
If the passage of some time was needed, what's the reason for now being the correct time for these advanced electronic systems? We've already needed a few thousand years, so maybe we need a few more thousand years.
Interesting (Score:1)
This feels like concessions because of getting thwomped in a trade war.
If the shortages are no more I'm all for it, but this feels like a non tariff related concession being made after hearing about the impact of trade restrictions from cronies.
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Yeah, but the weakness is that we're a Republic and (probably) have an enforceable constitution.
Without congressional support and barely maybe popular support it wasn't gonna stick (it seems very unlikely that the tarrifs would pass court muster to me).
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Yeah, but the weakness is that we're a Republic and (probably) have an enforceable constitution.
Just like Palpatine, Trump is trying to destroy the Republic. The only thing that will save us and the Republic is identifying who Jar Jar is and preventing his interference.
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Informative)
Trump is a bad negotiator and always has been.
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You forgot that Trump is weak. He's already caved in several times, ensuring that absolutely nobody is interested in making a "deal" if they can just give him the finger and watch him cave under popular support.
Why do you think China is telling him to get fucked, and keeps officially denying any form of negotiations whatsoever? Don't start what you can't finish, and China can always export all that shit they make to other countries. We can't exactly pivot to other countries for manufacturing in the same
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china would have been forced to the table in a matter of weeks months at the most if he did.
The hypothesis here is that Americans would be willing to suffer the deprivations of a trade war longer than the Chinese would be, forcing China to cry "uncle" first, if only Trump stuck to his guns for long enough.
I see several problems with that. The first is that Americans see themselves primary as customers and only secondarily as citizens, and the customer is always right -- so if Americans are unlikely to stand for getting squeezed economically for very long.
The second issue is that there are 195 cou
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Sure.
He had lunch with Jensen Huang from Nvidia.
And now this happens.
Gee, who do you think put this idea in his head? And who do you think just turned a million dollar lunch with an orange asshole into tens of billions of dollars?
Inconsistent (Score:1)
Re:Inconsistent (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's like someone let him know that Biden imposed export controls that Trump would have likely imposed himself, but just because Biden did it, he has to reverse it.
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Has China changed it's geopolitical stature with us?
The fact they made their own AI has zero to do with whether we continue to allow American companies to directly support their efforts.
You folks thing the economic issues (trade deficits) are the national security issues and the national security issues (China) are the economic issues. That's why Trump is so very ineffective on both of these.
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Yes, because they absolutely couldn't make it better with better hardware, could they?
Oh well they achieved good results, better just give up!
Re:TDS folks will hate this because of Trump (Score:5, Informative)
Why would TDS people hate this because of Trump? They love literally anything and everything Trump does, that's why they're deranged.
They'll even tell you the people who stormed congress to try to halt confirmation of an election on their dear leader's behalf were brave freedom fighters. If that's not someone acting deranged then I don't know what is.
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Re:TDS folks will hate this because of Trump (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, here is some video for everyone.
Video Of Capitol Riot Shown During First Jan. 6 Committee Hearing [youtube.com]
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Wow this revisionist history bullshit is AMAZING. Absolutely none of what you wrote happened.
1. J6 was in fact already politicized, 45 was shit-talking and whipping the crowd into a frenzy all morning with his cronies.
2. A few misguided people probably thought they were "protecting election integrity" but most of them knew it was a riot/coup and a free-for all to TAKE SENATORS HOSTAGE WITH CUFFS, you dumbass.
3. We all saw this on fucking TV. No, it wasn't a hand--holding KUM-BY-YAH moment, they were sh
Re:TDS folks will hate this because of Trump (Score:5, Informative)
Jan6 doesn't happen in a vacuum. Trumps fake electors plot [wikipedia.org] was already well underway and that's what Trump was telling Pence to do which he refused at first and was trying to get him to delay to buy more time on Jan6. That's the real thing that Jan6 was revolved around.
The fake electors plot should have gotten Trump a prison cell and maybe worse. Actual attempted coup and Jan6 was an insurrection. No if's ands or buts about it.
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Right, because people get shot on tours all the time in the US Capitol, right? And hundreds of cops injured?
Fucking simp.
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We've already proven by electing Trump that we're an unstable trading partner. China isn't going to suddenly abandon their ambitions because we've flip-flopped on the trade issue du jour.
To put it another way: the horse is gone, but Trump is sure having a blast playing with the barn door and telling everyone "This is such a great barn door. A beautiful wood. They just don't build barn doors like this anymore. See, once we get a new horse, a really great horse, it can't get out now! It will stay in the b
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I doubt they'd give it up. They've been working towards being the high-tech country for decades. But they would slow down, and be more efficient in their progress. (I don't think China believes in "move fast and break things"...except occasionally, and the last time didn't work out at all well.)
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China has been on the path to out-innovate the USA for awhile now. This has been going on long before our lawmakers got a whiff of that the USA was starting to smell of something resembling underdog rather than top dog. They're ahead of us in just about every aspect of EV infrastructure, and a Chinese company (DJI) practically has a monopoly on the photography drone market. Very recently, a Chinese-owned social media company also proved to be a bit too popular (and we can't have that, now can we?), so of
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Chips especially require massive upfront investment
"Massive upfront investment" is exactly what the Chinese government has been doing. They're willing to spend the money and take the risk.