Not to mention it'd defeat the whole purpose of a "free market" economy. (Not that that means much of anything anymore)
I don't think all of that is a bad thing (regulation tends to make it harder to do the first two things), but "free markets" are the economic equivalent to the "point mass" in physics: perhaps useful sometimes to create simple models and explanations of things, but will never exist in the real world.
But restricting the trade in micro chips only because the USA is afraid it will loose a technical and commercial edge is a long long way from a free market.
It is too late, too. China has broken out and they are ahead in many fields. Not trading chips with them will make them build their own foundries. In two decades they will be as far ahead there as they are in many other fields.
If the USA would trade then the technological capacities of China and the USA would stay matched, as they help each other. China ahead in some areas, the USA ahead in others.
That would still (probably) not be a pure Free Market but it would be a freer market, and better for everybody except a few elites (on both sides)
Madness is taking root
What's funny is that people have been saying this since OpenCL was announced but today we're actually in a worse spot than we were 10 years ago. China too - their inability to replicate EULV advancements has left their lithography in a terrible place.
There's a reason China is literally dependent on Nvidia for competitive hardware. It's their window into export-controlled TSMC wafers and complex streaming multiprocessor designs. Losing access to Nvidia hardware isn't an option for them (or the United States for that matter) which is why the US pushes so hard for export controls. There is no alternative.
Is it? Time will tell, but it wasn't "different" even during the crypto craze when CUDA was literally printing money. We were promised world-changing ASICs just like with Cereberas and Groq, and ended up with nothing in the end.
When AI's popularity blows over (and it will, like crypto), will the market have responded fast enough? From where I'm standing, it looks like every major manufacturer (and even the Chinese market) is trying the ASIC route again. And having watched ASICs die a very painful and unsatisfying death in the mining pools, I'd like to avoid manufacturing purpose-made ICs that are obsolete within months. I'm simply not seeing the sort of large-scale strategy that threatens Nvidia's actual demand.
Crypto mining was just about hash rates, so I don't think it really mattered whether you used CUDA or not. Nvidia cards were just faster usually. People did use AMD too, but that didn't really involve building up the OpenCL ecosystem, just making it run one particular algo. They do also use ASICs for BTC in particular, I don't think that died.
Every LLM provider in the US will be using it to lower OpEx.
One of them is likely to pass those savings along to consumers to gain market share.
Facebook is in the business of providing weights for free.
The idea that we are all doomed unless we immediately migrate to DeepSeek is fantasy.