alt Hacker News>they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
>China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
What about Huawei and their Ascend chips?
DeepSeek and z.ai now run their models on Ascends, and inference is basically a solved problem (especially with the architectural/ML optimizations, like 90% of them come from China right now).
From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need ~4 times more GPUs. Plus CUDA is a more mature stack than whatever Huawei provides (e.g. DeepSeek once failed to train on Ascends because they struggled with the stack). As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
>many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies
As opposed to many "successful" US companies living off investments without being actually profitable for years (or ever)?
> What about Huawei and their Ascend chips? From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need more of them. Slower = lagging behind the US further over time. As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
It's a catch-22 of sorts.
Either China can catch up (what exactly that will mean I'm unsure but I believe they will be able to), in which case we don't need to sell them the chips to let them do it faster, or they can't catch up in which case we shouldn't sell them chips allowing them to do so.
I'm just not seeing a compelling argument to sell them state of the art chips here.
> As opposed to many US companies living off investments without being profitable for years (or ever)?
No it's not comparable