alt Hacker NewsI'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
The TPUv4 and TPUv6 docs were stolen by a Chinese national in 2022/2023: https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-the-goo... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-charge...
And that's just 1 guy that got caught. Who knows how many other cases were there.
A Chinese startup is already making clusters of TPUs and has revenue https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3334244/ai-start-...
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Yeah I'm terrified that TPUs will get cheaper, that would be awful.
>Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.
I dont understand this part. What has nuclear base got to do with chip manufacturing? And surely, not all 600k students are learning chip design or stealing plans
>It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest.
How would this be a deadly blow to Google? Google makes TPUs for their own services and products, avoiding paying the expensive nvidia tax. If other people make similar products, this has effectively zero impact on Google.
nvidia knew their days were numbered, at least in their ownership of the whole market. And China hardly had to steal the great plans for a TPU to make one, and a FMA/MAC unit is actually a surprisingly simple bit of hardware to design. Everyone is adding "TPUs" in their chips - Apple, Qualcomm, Google, AMD, Amazon, Huawei, nvidia (that's what tensor cores are) and everyone else.
And that startup isn't the big secret. Huawei already has solutions matching the H20. Once the specific need that can be serviced by an ASIC is clear, everyone starts building it.
>America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to
What great advantage do you think this is?
America isn't remotely the great gatekeeper on this. If anything, Taiwan + the Netherlands (ASML) are. China would yield infinitely more value in learning manufacturing and fabrication secrets than cloning some specific ASIC.
Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans.
There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.