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I guess I don't understand what the point is? A100s are extremely powerful and generally used for ML or mining, right? But mining is already illegal in China and if the PRC wants to do military AI, I'm sure they're capable of building their own super computer without A100s. This isn't banning weaponized ai. It just seems like a minor annoyance to a couple of China's bigger companies who will quickly produce alternatives if they need to

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> I'm sure they're capable of building their own super computer without A100s

They are most certainly not capable of doing this without silicon imports. Chinese manufacturing is hopelessly behind for the next decade at least.

They still need the manufacturing capabilities of Taiwan, exactly like USA, which is also unable to manufacture GPUs, but they have already designed their own datacenter GPUs (see other comments above), so they no longer depend on NVIDIA or any other US vendor of GPUs.

So this GPU export ban has come much too late, exactly when it no longer matters.

But nation states have never been restricted by export bans. For example the US during the Cold War bought titanium for the SR71 from the Soviet Union. And Russia is buying chips on the black market today for its invasion of Ukraine.

The comment I replied to is saying that without access to this specific CPU, they can still compete. That's tangential to whether or not they could get their hands on it anyways.

AI, mining, and gaming aren't the only use of GPUs in the datacenter, (physical) model simulations are a large use case as well.

Maybe the point is just to prevent shortages

An A100 is MSRP ~$32000 and mines ether at less than 3X the rate of a $700 3080.

Is there some fancy new coin out there that people mine with Tesla GPUs?

Your priors are wrong on military, ai, and capability with manufacturing. There is a reason there is only a couple fabs in the world.

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