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Notes -
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/nvidia-and-sia-fire-back-at-u-s-govs-new-export-restrictions-on-ai-gpus-to-china
The US has formally decreed who gets GPUs and who doesn't. Here's a map:
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/1877773878858047608
Tier 2 countries include Portugal, Poland, Ukraine, Singapore, the UAE... (understandable since the UAE and Singapore are generally thought to be leaking GPUs on to China). But it's a pretty big snub to Poland and Portugal IMO, they're in NATO. I guess Trump's disdain for American allies is not totally unique to him. In practice though, this doesn't mean that much since it's not like Poland will need tens of thousands of GPUs in the next two years. India is also in tier 2, though again they're not really organized enough to get very far anyway. I think Tier 2 is anyone who is considered untrustworthy (and who can afford to be snubbed). Poland won't stop licking America's boots so who cares what they think? Or perhaps they're distrusting of Eastern Europeans generally.
Tier 3 are the US's primary enemies, the usual suspects.
I doubt that in practice this will have much impact. China is already very good at siphoning away US-made GPUs or accessing them via the cloud and they also have their own GPU industry. Their GPUs are qualitatively inferior to Nvidia but there is nothing stopping them from dedicating all leading-edge wafer production to GPUs and just eating higher power costs in datacentres. China is not short on electrical power production. China's AI development speed depends primarily on the seriousness of the government and only secondarily on sanctions, there are many things they could do to speed things up. For instance, China could redirect compute resources to Deepseek who has tiny allocations of compute even by Chinese standards. They could mobilize tens of millions to provide annotated high quality data, or at least block US companies buying training data from them...
Everyone else is too far behind the curve to matter.
The speed with which China moves from qualitatively inferior to on par is amazing. Up to the point that when it comes to small electronics (scales, chargers etc) even the most chinesium ones work quite acceptable.
The chineese phone flagships are quite good recently.
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