alt Hacker NewsBecause they arent selling at a loss. The business pipeline is subsidized by the state. But end to end from mining the minerals to shipping you the solar panel everything is "in house". Its all in China. Thats why why can sell so cheap. Its even cheaper to make.
This narative that the CCP is just subsidizing all business to "beat america" is just dumb. Its the build process being made cheaper by the government. Not the final product.
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As far as I can tell, the Chinese government itself is complaining about 'oversupply' in the solar panel market. Ie it doesn't sound like they are subsidising it anymore.
Selling at a loss isn't required.
Local governments are over-funding numerous producers (though cheap loans and other subsidies and incentives) creating excess competition. This is an ongoing problem and is a huge misallocation of capital. Increasing demand just drives this process harder and puts downward pressure on margins. As soon as they try raising prices, or just through satisfying total demand, demand collapses and they (almost) all go out of business.
The Chinese model has weaknesses, we should be exploiting them.
Let’s not act like the US government isn’t subsidizing AI either with massive contracts. Anthropic is selling subscriptions at a loss; reselling tokens is just arbitrage.