alt Hacker NewsProliferation of something doesn't mean it's dominant. Android has the dominant global market share, but Apple makes all the money.
W.r.t the United States government and its people restricting sales of the most advanced chips form Nvidia there are two realistic conclusions you can draw (neither of which result in SMIC and/or Huawei "obliterating" anyone):
1. China is behind and needs to catch up, and the way to do that is through subterfuge to get more chips imported into the country. In other words, they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already, and so it doesn't matter whether the US restricts the sale or not other than maybe a few billion dollars in lost sales to a few companies which isn't really relevant.
With respect to Chinese electric cars and the American market, the American market is highly profitable and while we don't have great EVs we also don't really need them for anything, and while China maintains a stranglehold on rare earth mineral processing we can't put ourselves in a position where an adversary can effectively shut down our auto industry and leave us in a bad position. Of course there are existing single points of failure, chokeholds, and things like that, but there's no need to add fuel to the fire.
Most Chinese automakers are not competitive, the Chinese auto market is slowing down, and many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies and have built factories which are not able due to lack of demand to produce the volumes of vehicles that were expected. American strategy (and soon European strategy) to limit imports of Chinese vehicles results in a resounding win for union jobs, stability of American, European, Japanese, and Korean automakers, and uses what I'll describe as a judo move (using your opponents strengths and momentum against them) to harm the Chinese economy and their goal of instituting mass manufacturing overcapacity.
Replies
> which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
Because they don't have TSMC or ASML and the Dutch can turn those lithography machines off from the other side of the world. Nvidia is likely the least important part of the supply chain which is why governments were not very concerned with the behavior which they would have been aware of for a while.
1. It's not just about profit. Sometimes it's really about market share.
2. You live under a rock it you don't see the earthquake that Chinese automakers are. Or chip makers. You seem absolutely oblivious of the world around you. Something US CEOs that travel the world extensively are not.
3. European carmakers are by nature export oriented and they oppose tariffs on Chinese cars, especially German carmakers. Reality is that neither European nor US carmakers (and many other technological sectors) can't keep the pace with Asians, whether it's making ships, steel, chips, tvs, or cars. We just don't. It's only US car makers that can be happy of those measures, because the cars Americans make suck, are ugly, expensive and inefficient. You had a brief period with Tesla being some kind of innovator in the space, but that's also over.
>they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
>China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
What about Huawei and their Ascend chips?
DeepSeek and z.ai now run their models on Ascends, and inference is basically a solved problem (especially with the architectural/ML optimizations, like 90% of them come from China right now).
From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need ~4 times more GPUs. Plus CUDA is a more mature stack than whatever Huawei provides (e.g. DeepSeek once failed to train on Ascends because they struggled with the stack). As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
>many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies
As opposed to many "successful" US companies living off investments without being actually profitable for years (or ever)?
2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
Have you looked at Huawei Ascend chips? They are on a 7nm process, so at first blush you could say they're not competitive. I think they run at at between 15045% the performance of Nvidia's fancy chips (Grace Blackwell etc) and also consume a lot more power, presumably requiring more power again to dissipate the resulting heat.
On the plus side, though, they're designed from the group up to sit in massive arrays have 4tb of memory interconnect bandwidth. My understandin g is that model providers like Deepseek are doing their training on nvidia gPUs but all the inference is moving toward Huawei.
At some point they'll be caught up, either via lithography breakthroughs, or by building on their architectual strengths.