To me, this looks like a win.
Governments are there to finance projects like this that enable the country to have certain skillsets that wouldn't exist otherwise because of other countries having better solutions in the global market.
The fp64 GFLOPS per watt metric in the post is almost entirely meaningless to compare between these accelerators and NVIDIA GPUs, for example it says
> Hopper H200 is 47.9 gigaflops per watt at FP64 (33.5 teraflops divided by 700 watts)
But then if you consider H100 PCIe [0] instead, it's going to be 26000/350 = 74.29 GFLOPS per watt. If you go look harder you can find ones with better on-paper fp64 performance, for example AMD MI300X has 81.7 TFLOPs with typical board power of "750W Peak", which gives 108.9 GFLOPS per watt.
The truth is the power allocation of most GPGPUs are heavily tilted for Tensor usages. This has been the trend well before B300.
That's all for HPC.
And Pezy processors are certainly not designed for "AI" (i.e. linear algebra with lower input precision). For AI inference starting from 2020 everyone is talking about how many T(FL)OPS per watt, not G.
[0] which is a nerfed version of H200's precursor.
Just like it doesn’t work to try an ecosystem based on one species, a society has to blend government and private spending. They work on different incentives and timeframes, and both have pitfalls that the other might handle better.
But what governments often can do, is break local optimums clustering around the quarter economy and take moonshot chances and find paths otherwise never taken. Hopefully one of these paths are great.
The difficult thing becomes deciding when to pull the plug. Is ITER a good thing or not? (Results wise, it is, but for the money? Who can tell really.)
Well, at least VCs don't burn through my tax money, whilst they are failing at picking winners.
See how IBM was on the path to inventing electronic computers for business and accounting, but got pre-empted by the militaries' needs and procurement.
In the counterfactual if there hadn't been a war going on, presumably businesses would have had even more needs for international business machines.
Military/government procurement provided the demand for which private entities could provide, money and other resources at level that private market never managed.
Without large injection of money supply there's not much extra dollar to chase and safe investments sound like better bets.
This provided demand for products and services that simply was not there in private form, allowing way riskier investments - all the way to 1980s Silicon Valley was mostly riding downstream of military procurement (Can't source the quote right now, but Sun microsystems be-or-not-be was landing a contract for NSA for Unix workstations - because NSA could frontload an order for few hundred if not thousands workstations)