U.S. Bans Sales of Nvidia's H100, A100 GPUs to Middle East | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Bans Sales of Nvidia's H100, A100 GPUs to Middle East

tomshardware.com

57 pointsironyman68 comments

> Now, the U.S. government is concerned is that Nvidia's A100 and H100 compute GPUs could be diverted to China from customers in the Middle East.

Sounds like eventually they're gonna have to ban the sale of those GPU to any country that doesn't start with the letter U and ends with SA, if they truly want to avoid anyone in China getting a hold of those.

Given how small the chips are, even that won't be enough.

As these chips get more powerful, in the future, the chip won't compute before getting an authorization token from some central authority.

It seems that we are just one Moore's law away from that reality.

If this is how we get unauthorized bread I don't dislike it.

Are you sure about that double negative?

The Middle East has already established itself as a conduit for sanctioned goods to Russia and now China.

If every other country feels that they want to be such a conduit and suffer the consequences, then that's on them. But realistically US allies are unlikely to do that so the EU, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Japan, South Korea and Canada may end up being the only countries that can buy high end US technology.

Personally, I'm totally fine with that. I think trade in critical good and services, especially those with obvious military and mass oppression uses should be allies only by default.

Your US-centric view makes no sense. The machines to make the chips are made in the Netherlands, the mirrors for those machines in Germany, to be finally fabbed in Taiwan. Furthermore, if you ever want a more challenging job, then I would invite you to try to convince a German to do something outside the law.

Maybe not just the USA, maybe a list of countries. They can call it the Five AIs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

When has China become "Middle East" and does it means that these GPUs will be banned in Israel as well?

The goal is to prevent resale to China. That goal is impossible, but this would add an extra step in their view and draws a clear line in the proverbial sand. Also pretty sure they mean "political" and not "regional" middle East, so Israel wouldn't be banned.

I do feel bad for the researchers and techs over there with legitimate needs for these GPUs

It just means China has to buy them from Israeli companies. Watch exponential growth of H100 consumption in Israel ;-)

Those researchers likely can still use public cloud environments. Many middle eastern companies have a U.S. branch

> Also pretty sure they mean "political" and not "regional" middle East, so Israel wouldn't be banned.

I am not sure there is a clear definition of that. But yes for some reason Israel and Turkia compete in Eurovision while Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt while these are also members of the UER.

Sounds to me like the definition is more about the religion and language than political.|

Having said that I checked again and Israel is not Middle-East, nor is Middle-East a real geographical area. For example according to wikipedia Egypt and Turkey are considered middle-east while Israel/Jordan/Syria/Lebanon are considered West Asia. Despite the fact that Egypt is more in the West than these 4 countries.

We also make a strange distinction between Central-Asia and Middle-East which semantically should mean the same thing.

All this to say that the title of the article and the umbrella word "Middle-East" should stop being used and governments as well as news outlets should be more specific.

It is funny how the term persisted considering the use of Near and Far East are out dated.

But I'm not even sure we can say completely cultural because in some places I see Iran lumped in with the "Middle East" grouping. Might as well just go for an acronym a la BRICS

This is just a ban on the UAE Tech sector (I don't think Saudi Arabia has any noticeable tech industry or their efforts will lead anywhere).

The GPUs can be resold to China (either physically or through compute) from anywhere in the world. If there is a premium, some people (Chinese investors?) will do the job.

The Saudis have been paying lots of professors buttloads of money to pretend they are associated with Saudi universities. Recently I have been seeing professors at western universities claiming a dual appointment with some Saudi university.

This is more reputation washing than real research.

ME countries have relatively lax business laws if you pay the right people and financial/business records are hard to get ahold of as an international investigator.

After US sanctions hit Russia, many of the companies magically were headquartered in the UAE months later. China was using a Syrian branch of an African company to funnel restricted computer equipment to Iran. Back in March a UAE based operation was sanctioned for washing Iranian oil via other Middle Eastern countries for sale on the global market.

This type of ban has the unintended consequence of strengthening/accelerating the domestic market of the party you are trying to sanction. This has happened with Turkey (F35/TF-x, Patriot/Hisar-Siper, the whole UAV/UCAV programmes etc.) and currently happening with China (them acquiring investing in foundry know how and capacity, Huawei investing in its own OS). Would be exciting to see what this one will bring.

My guess is that the US has made the calculation that China has already embarked on the local investment. This is the best (only?) chance they get to slow them down.

True - maybe I should replace "unintended" with "calculated"

I think the US is weaponizing Nvidia under the disguise of security, but it's just trying to squash competition. That sets a bad precedence in my opinion. The world will come to rely less on the US products and services. Free markets are less free. International cooperation is harder. It becomes us vs them.

> The world will come to rely less on the US products and services.

Thats why I'm kinda rooting for multipolarity in the 1st place!

Sorry to break it to you but that won't ever be sustainable.

I don’t know. A multipolar world might lead to more wars.

A unipolar world isn’t fair but when no one is near-peer with the toughest guy on the block, a fight is unlikely to break out - that toughest guy often plays police too so war among the rest is reduced as well.

Question is if the US should be that police. I think the majority outside will say no; maybe they cannot do anything about it at the moment, but long term they might band more together.

Multipolarity will just result in lawlessness and mutliple US style "invasions" a year. Horray.

For all that is broken about US democracy, I'd prefer a unipolar world with the US and EU running things than a multipolar world where the current regimes in China (or Russia) have equal standing.

I dont understand this free markets thing

Gov and ppl in power always influence stuff

> I dont understand this free markets thing

It’s dog whistling for the rentiers.

It doesn’t actually exist in the shape that people often think it does. People really think that it’s all about non-government interference within the markets but after 08 and the bajilion other once in a lifetime market meltdowns, I don’t know how anyone can say that this fairytale version of the free market exists.

It doesn’t exist and if you’re working class and you think it does you aren’t serving yourself.

The free market is one that is free from economic rent.

It’s not “free market”/competition when one country continually steals IP and then produces as its own

Whatever stealing China does, banning exports of certain items to them isn't going to prevent it from happening: enough will get through for it to do any R&D on them it wants and doesn't do anything to prevent corporate espionage.

They can do all the R/D they want, however, they can’t produce on a large scale. Meaning, they won’t have a lot of the same capabilities these chips offer at scale.

It doesn't, but it makes it that much more difficult and any barrier, no matter how slight, slows down the effort.

And like I mentioned in a comment above, it's the US drawing a line in the sand, signalling to the world you can play nice and continue to have access to US tech, or don't and good luck

"Playing nice" in this case being adapting to a cultural hegemony. For all my issues with China and it's government I also like to live in a world where different states try out different ways of relating to intellectual property.

And will it really take researchers in China that much longer to get a chip? Maybe like a few extra weeks?

So you're saying that Chinese having little to no respect for IP is just their culture? And we should respect that?

And you think 'a few extra weeks' is all it'll take for the Chinese to develop the technology that ASML has taken several decades to perfect, which is required to produce these chips?

I guess if they steal ASML IP, sorry, relate to ASML intellectual property differently, you might be right.

> So you're saying that Chinese having little to no respect for IP is just their culture? And we should respect that?

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Do you feel that our relationship to intellectual property is somehow less rooted in culture or that it deserves more respect?

> And you think 'a few extra weeks' is all it'll take for the Chinese to develop the technology

No, I said that a delay of a few weeks before beginning their research wouldn't be a major setback in the grand scheme of their work.

Well the concept of IP property is just an unilateral decision from those who want to use that as a commercial weapon.

Nothing else.

It doesn't mean the concept is universally accepted.

That depends on whether one believes one can own an idea. Germany did not acknowledge IP rights in the 19th century and their economy rapidly industrialized and boomed. US industry also got its start by ignoring British IP laws.

So it sounds like its bad business to trade ideas for future markets.

This doesn't change the fact that — from the perspective of the US — it does't make sense to sell H100s to China

This is a end of free trade and a return of the old empires, with there embargos and the great games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game These empires and there funny little starvations they inflicted carelessly on there provinces (france on africa, england on india, irland) were the reason for WW2. Never again!

No, the reason for WW2 was Hitler and the OG Nazi regime. The old colonial bullshit had pretty much nothing to do with the causes for WW2.

In any case we saw that "change by trade" ("Wandel durch Handel" in German) aka spreading the idea of human rights and democracy by establishing trade zones and routes didn't work out - most of Africa is either failed states, military dictatorships or theocracies, everything in the "Middle East" is either theocracies or on the fringe of becoming one (Israel), the situation in Asia isn't much different.

In addition to that, our own democracies are nearing tipping points as well with the rise of the far-right that mostly makes bank by exploiting the destitution that globalization has brought upon our societies where a lot of manufacturing and other industry jobs have been shipped off to Asia.

Globalization needs to be turned back. I do not see any valid reason why the money of Western people should be flowing towards countries that actively disrespect our values.

Harber Bosch was present before WW2. WW2 was mostly fought for Lebensraum, aka place to grow food with medieval methods (no fertilizer) for a industrial sized nation. They could easily have fed all these people, if free trade and fossil fuel imports would have been available and guaranteed. No reason to start the whole war in the first place.

But they were not- and could not be relied on if a colonial empire singled you out and cut trade. Thus the war aims, the goals and execution. The existence of the british empire or a similar empire was the precondition for WW2.

You've got it the wrong way around, it's already 'us vs them' due to 'them' attempting to seize large swathes of other countries water rights, land, invading and threatening to invade key US allies, using trade to coerce countries, manipulating poor and vulnerable countries for military purposes, and generally increasing military aggressiveness.

The 'free markets' idealism is at best naive. Making money by arming your adversary (see above) doesn't make much sense. Your first sentence happens to correspond to Chinese propaganda but that's surely a coincidence.

> You've got it the wrong way around, it's already 'us vs them' due to 'them' attempting to seize large swathes of other countries water rights, land, invading and threatening to invade key US allies, using trade to coerce countries, manipulating poor and vulnerable countries for military purposes, and generally increasing military aggressiveness.

Long story short, the US is upset that China started doing what they were doing for decades. Oh, the irony...

You guys get that the term ‘free market’ was used to describe markets free from economic rent, right?

You guys seriously need some readings in economics in order to understand the position you’re in. You’ve allowed your rentiers to deindustrialize your country to chase profits in the global south.

What do you guys think you’re getting for your deindustrialization? Financialization. What does that mean? It means you’re getting, in large part, the benefits from your first paragraph – and associated rents.

But yeah, Chinese propaganda and such and such is easier to sell.

> What do you guys think you’re getting for your deindustrialization?

It is a myth that the U.S. has deindustrialized. The value of manufactured goods in the US has markedly increased over the decades. It has only ever dropped significantly during recessions.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLMNTO02USA189N

Not sure how you can possibly claim that deindustrialization is a myth amidst constant talk of reshoring industry.

It is no secret that manufacturing was moved to Asia and you’re presenting figures of “sale values”.

What does this say of the industries? What is the production like? What is meant by manufactured? Is this inflation adjusted? Value is up but what about throughput? What is being produced and who is buying it?

Manufacturing employment has been falling for over 40 years [1]. We live in a service oriented consumption based economy.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling...

Probably directed at Saudi Arabia. Surefire way to send even more business to Huawei.

I understand the reasoning but it’s weird that while we’ve expeced continual progress in flops every year or so, this will now put basically a mandatory upper limit (forever?) on how powerful computers can be (in these countries)

"free trade"

If we could like not supercharge communist dictatorships with AI high-tech, that would be great.

Yeah let's supercharge capitalist imperialist oligopolies instead!

At least they can be broken up, like with the robber barons of the previous century

( … cue evil sounding and very long laughter inside nondescript lobbying office )

Theoretically yes, practically the US government has been bought off by the tech elites.

I highly recommend the work of Matt Stoller in this regard (1), in particular his book Goliath (2) that goes over the history of monopoly fights over the past century and laid out how we got to where we have today (hint: eerily similar to the 1920s but not as bad)

1. https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

2. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/goliath-how-monopolies-secretl...

Google/Apple/<Massive corp> will be broken any day now.

The tide is turning from the moronic stance of maximum efficiency for the consumer over all other considerations. I think what will really precipitate it is if the US and China enter a hot conflict and some company like NVIDIA continues to do business in China. It happened before with Alcoa not only slowing the buildup of US artillery but also providing the Nazis with the necessary materials before the government stepped in (1). The heads of the US military have already identified monopoly as a national defence issue

1. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/28/wall-street-world-war-i...

[citation needed]

Has Google broken by anti-trust laws? There is your citation. They've been pulling suspicious moves for last decade.

On this website you can say that and not be unceremoniously jailed. It’s false equivalence.

The moment any grassroots efforts amass enough momentum to challenge the US plutocracy they will be shut down violently. Until then, they don't care if people complain about the system publicly. Freedom to complain still doesn't change material outcomes in the US.

It should be pretty clear for anyone that any opposition is tolerated as long as it is not seen as a threat. Moreover, the idea that you should be able to say lots of stuff without getting locked up is rapidly going out of fashion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/technology/germany-intern...

Nah, for US anything goes as long as there is some petroleum to be gained from.

Naturally it tends be disguised as freeing the country.

Like CIA helping drug lords in South America, during the 1980's.

You mean "spreading democracy".

"Free trade", like "free speech", does not mean unlimited & uncontrolled.

I can't figure out if this was legit or American businesses trying to get the price of GPUs down.

China probably doesn't even need them.

The reason we need so many in the West is because of the nature of capitalistic competition. Datacenters are full of GPUs next to each other (or even the same one just time divided) serving companies who are trying to beat the other out and gain customers

If one put even a fraction of all the compute used to make the current landscape into one foundational model (which they don't have to bother to build safety for nor pay alignment tax on) it would probably make gpt4 look like gpt2.

Not to mention they don't have to give the average person access to anything, they can invoke their MaoAI only for governmental purposes and just the rest a simple 6B model or something.

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