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Comment by pixelesque | Hacker News Reader

Note also that today China has told its tech companies to cancel any NVIDIA AI chip orders and not to order any more:

https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...

200% tariff incoming :-)

"Speaker Johnson says China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban" - https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/china-us-nvidia-chip-ban.htm...

Translation: "We are angry with China that they wont let the US undermine itself, and sell its strategic advantages to them..."

> "Speaker Johnson says China is straining U.S. relations with Nvidia chip ban"

Oh, the irony.

Is this supposed to signal confidence in the chips already available on China's domestic chip market, or is it primarily aimed at boosting that market to make it ready?

My cynical view is that it's mostly trade war and nationalism. If you follow the official PRC position, the chips are already made in China because TW is CN... Practically buying TW chips is boosting it's economy and hence funding it's military so from that perspective that makes sense. From long term development perspective this will absolutely boost national market... however that will take an insane amount of time. If you buy into AI is going to change everything hype, this move is a huge handicap and hence a boon to external economies. And I am probably missing a ton of viewpoints... politics meh

if you don't know what you're talking about you don't have to say anything, you know

I think those are both the case: they’re telling Chinese companies to invest in domestic hardware–implicitly also saying things like being prepared to stop using CUDA–and that means the hardware vendors know not to skimp on getting there (a nicer version of burning the landing boats on the beach).

It’s also an interesting signal to the rest of the world that they’re going to be an option. American tech companies should be looking at what BYD is doing to Tesla, but they’re also dealing with a change in government to be more like Chinese levels of control but with less maturity.

Yes. :)

How big a deal is it to be on the cutting edge with this? Given that models seem to be flattening out because they can't get any more data, the answer is "not as much as you would think".

Consequently, a generation or 2 behind is annoying, but not fatal. In addition, if you pump the memory up, you can paper over a lot of performance loss. Look at how many people bought amped up Macs because the unified memory was large even though the processing units were underpowered relative to NVIDIA or AMD.

The biggest problem is software. And China has a lot of people to throw at software. The entire RISC-V ecosystem basically only exists because Chinese grad students have been porting everything in the universe over to it.

So, the signal is to everybody around this that the Chinese government is going to pump money at this. And that's a big deal.

People always seem to forget that Moore's Law is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but doesn't just happen out of thin air. It happens because a lot of companies pump a lot of money at the engineering because falling off the semiconductor hamster wheel is death. The US started the domestic hamster wheel with things like VHSIC. TSMC was a direct result of the government pumping money at it. China can absolutely kickstart this for themselves if the money goes where it should.

I'm really torn about this. On the one hand, I hate what China does on many, many political fronts. On the other hand, tech monopolies are pillaging us all and, with no anti-trust action anywhere in the West, the only way to thwart them seems to be by China coming along and ripping them apart.

Arguably, the leading RISC-V IP is from US firms like SiFive; it has also caught major traction with NVDA in custom products, and US Govt for various industries, and even Redhat is now supporting RH on Risc-V

Microchip Inc partnered w US Govt on the aerospace angle and funded Canonical for linux ports. Their Polarfires and now Euro aerospace like Gaisler are heading in the same direction. US Govt/DARPA and others have been funding risc-v ports for years, to include mainly automated porting.

There are big differences between lowend profile-challenged SBCs and the work of NVDA, Microchip Inc, and the US Govt in the much more highend GPU related, and safety critical industries.

With Heavyweights like IBM/Redhat now on risc-v joining canonical and others, the SW side is definitely improving

TSMC btw, has always been about labor arbitrage

“grey market” smugglers gonna keep working on it

Until now it was perfectly legal to buy nVidia chips in China. It was the US that was blocking export.

Which way though? From the USA to China or China to the USA?

Are they allowed to rent them from server farms, datacenters, etc. located outside China that are able to procure them?

"Are they allowed to rent them from server farms, datacenters, etc. located outside China that are able to procure them?"

alicloud has many cluster outside china, so they probably can because many friendly country with china has it

but it would be the same with US power play, they only permit anyone that they accept

That is going to really slow LLM development in China. But more GPUs for everyone else!

I mean, progress is already getting slow in llm development space and their qwen models are, well, good enough for time being. Meanwhile, its good for the world that they are working on their own chips, that way nVidia will have to stop being comfortable.

This is step in good direction for everyone except nvidia and its chinese distribution network

They have more electric power (also cheaper), more data centers. I bet AI development will be slower elsewhere.

Yup - at some level of scale it's very much an infrastructure game.

No amount of trade war politics will make up for a lack in infrastructure investment.

In 24 months, US hyperscalers will be training models on GPUs/XPUs with 16A process technology and HBM4E. The gap between the raw processing power of US and Chinese AI hardware will be widening.

I wish I had your confidence being able to forecast 24 months ahead. In 24 months TSMC could be a smoking crater.

There won’t be 16A manufacturing here in the USA.

Probably ever.

We live in extremely dangerous uncertain times.

Any forecast that long is worthless.

You seem extremely pessimistic. TSMC SoW-X will put an entire wafer worth of chips on a single substrate and be incredibly fast.

https://wccftech.com/tsmc-cutting-edge-sow-x-packaging-set-f...

Why would you say 16A would never be manufactured in the United States? It is of course TSMC’s plan of record.

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