The US opted to veto the advanced chips of AI in China. The shot has come absolutely for the cylinder head

In September 2022 the United States intensified its commercial war with China with a singular measure: prohibited export of advanced chips from AI to the Asian giant. That decision was aimed at protecting the innovation capacity of the United States and incidentally Zancadilla to China. Or try, because the truth is that the play has been a real pifia.

Nvidia is suffering the consequences. The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, gave a talk in Computex in which critical strongly that measure and all that followed it. “Four years ago, Nvidia had 95% market share in China. Today is only 50%. The rest is Chinese technology. They have a lot of local technology they would use if they did not have Nvidia.”

The veto has caused the opposite effect. Huang continued to say that those measures They have caused just the opposite that was intended. Instead of leaving China back in the field of technological innovation, they have awakened it. “Export controls have provided them with the spirit (to innovate), and government support has accelerated its development. Our competition is intense in China. “

The H20 chip has been a ruin for Nvidia. The last of the examples of this disaster we have In the H20 chipa “trimmed” and less capable version of its most advanced chips that was developed precisely for the Chinese market. Although During all 2024 Nvidia was allowed to export that chip to China, in April the US government prohibited these sales. That caused some losses of 5.5 billion dollars In Nvidia, a hard blow from which they now try to recover with A new version that Not even It will be based on Hopper architecture.

USA should back. For Huang, the strategy is the wrong one: “If the US wants to stay ahead, we need to maximize and accelerate the diffusion (of our technology), not limit it.” The Government prepares the review of the “AI DIFFUSION RULE” issued by Biden in January 2025. This regulation further restricted exports to China of Hardware and AI software.

CUDA, also threatened. The hardware is no longer the problem, but there is an important one with CUDA, the NVIDIA ecosystem that is absolute reference for solutions of IA software solutions. Huawei has an alternative called Cann, but there are several Western companies that also want to get rid of the domain of CUDA. Among them are Intel, Openai and of course, AMD, that in fact It has technically higher chips to those of Nvidia but that actually behave worse for having lower software.

But China goes to yours. The striking thing about all this is that the US strategy has caused a spectacular effect in China, where the development of “very socialist” models It is now overwhelming – Deepseek R1 is the clear example. But they are also making surprising chips Like Huawei’s Ascend 910ccomparable to the almost mythical Nvidia H100. The thing does not end there: they are already preparing the deployment of The new ascend 910dwhich is supposed to even go further.

Image | Nvidia | Dominic Kurniawan

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