alt Hacker NewsNvidia GPUs aren't even the absolute SOTA for LLM inference anymore. Some labs are moving to ASICs and Huawei already have their own custom chips running DeepSeek as we speak.
There's enough money and scale on the line that software affinity like CUDA is no longer the deciding factor and there's margin for custom stacks.
Even more so after the USA GPU exports ban which is proving to have backfired by speeding up China's tech growth.
Definitely hasn’t backfired. Exporting would have just sped up their progress. Instead they had to get clever and lean into the bottleneck which for them, now, is compute efficiency. This is temporary and they’ll figure out competitive chip design and production but not for several more years. It’s incredibly hard to match the quality of NVidia and TSMC, as China has found throughout years of trying.