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The Nvidia H20 exports ban is back on?
Lets recap. DeepSeek stuns the world by dropping a model almost as good as SOTA models while flexing incredible performance gains through cunning Chinese hacking. It's revealed they used lower end H20 GPUs vs the more decadent A100 / H100 / B100 class chips that fat American programmers use. Thusly, the US moves to ban exports of H20s as well.
Except last week, on April 9th, following the news of Jensen Huang dropping a million bucks at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, the ban is apparently lifted, stunning all China hawks in the country (and AI safetyists) and demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.
But today, Nvidia announces the export ban is on. And ... apparently was never lifted? The market reacts and knocks them down a few points.
What... happened? Checking back, it seems the only source for the news that the H20 ban was lifted was "two unnamed sources" reported by NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5356480/nvidia-china-ai-h20-chips-trump
Weirdly, neither the USG nor Nvidia commented on it.
Can we read into the fact that since neither party commented on it, lifting the H20 ban was actually on the table? Was this leaked by one side to put pressure on the other? Was it a trial balloon? Or do we even trust that NPR actually reached out for comment like they said they did?
I think Jensen actually got the verbal agreement from Trump after, in Trump's terms, kissing his ass at the dinner, and then somebody briefed Trump on what "H20" stands for. We'll probably never know but would be perfectly in style for this administration. I was stunned to see those news, because obviously Trump loves tariffs and export controls and has a thing for CHI-NA, this is one topic where there's a strong bipartisan consensus that China must be denied ML-grade compute, and the ban was already in place. Well, back to normality.
Is trade “selling out”? Is 1 million H20s strategically relevant? More than, say, rare earth ban from China, which could perhaps be negotiated?
I found this Klein-Friedman exchange interesting.
This whole AGI race is pretty unfortunate. From my point of view, very similar to Friedman's, the US is in deep shit. It has deluded itself into the belief that it has greater advantage than is actually the case and that Wang Huning's series of ideologies actually lead towards a global hegemony, from that premise invented the self-serving narrative of desperately needing to “contain” or “isolate” China (which has “betrayed American goodwill” by not becoming liberal as expected and even “backsliding” with Xi) at all costs, and then bizarrely procrastinated on doing anything effective (like these tariffs, or seriously arming Taiwan) for next to a decade, then attacked China with extreme vindictiveness, going after Huawei on half-baked pretext and trying to kill their national champion (the US today has no companies or entities held in such esteem by citizens – I don't know, it'd be like Soviets trying to kill Ford or something? Maybe NASA at its zenith?). The Chinese are temperamentally not disposed to total war in times of good trade and improving fortunes, but are capable of waging it, and have taken the clue and for the last 6 or so years have been working on their resilience. So here we are, the US is even more arrogant and delusional about its relative standing, its non-kinetic means of communication are running out, and nobody in either party even dares to raise the point of rapprochement or thaw, because it's a career killer. Literally Soviets were treated with more rationality and caution, and let me tell you, other than warhead count, Soviets had nothing on modern China. In short, when there's a real possibility that you will not secure a decisive win no matter how much more “serious” you get, maybe it's time to reassess the game board.
Anyway, H20s don't matter a great deal now, it's always been a gimped inference-only chip. Huawei can produce 910Cs (partially with those 2 million 910B dies they got from TSMC via shell companies, but domestically too), they're not great but close to H100 level, and Huawei is extremely good at engineering so it can make absolutely insane CloudMatrix 384 servers outclassing Nvidia's newest NVL72 Blackwells, though at the cost of much higher chip count and power draw – but power is one of many resources that China has in abundance, and will have even more in abundance as it takes offline some aluminum overcapacity to fulfill the KPI of “higher value added per Watt”. These are probably already supplied to DeepSeek for training V4/R2, and other businesses are known to run R1 and V3 on them.
As I've said 1 and a half years ago,
I failed to anticipate MAGA Juche, but oh well. Also the list of relevant companies from that side has shifted a lot, today I'd say also: ByteDance, DeepSeek, Moonshot…
The warheads counted for a lot.
But I think the Soviets leapfrogged or sidestepped the US on military tech more often than China has – maybe that's just vibes.
I'm not making a "China can't innovate" argument (in fact my understanding is for some period, perhaps continuing to this day, they were building iterative designs of major warships to keep pace with their evolving mastery of technology and technique, which certainly is not blind adherence to formula), but the impression that I have gotten is that China has for the last oh 20ish years focused on building out its tech base, bringing it in-house, and bringing its designs up to a modern standard. Their approach has been good and pragmatic but they have been pushing the limits of American military capability by sheer quantity and by exploiting hideous blind spots in American post-Cold War defense drawdowns, not by cutting edge or even funky designs, with maybe a few exceptions.
Nevertheless I tend to find that I am more impressed and amused by Soviet and later Russian engineering than Chinese engineering – perhaps because I have a tendency towards mild Russophilia, perhaps because I pay less attention to Chinese systems, perhaps because their innovations are still classified, but I find Soviet/Russians designs unusual and capable of solving problems in ways that are elegant even in their brutality.
American designs in my opinion are often overly perfectionistic [which I think is tolerable for some high-end systems but the tendency has begun to wag the dog after the Cold War] and Chinese designs lend themselves towards being calmly pragmatic. They are, I think, just now in the past decade or two beginning to feel increasingly confident in many areas of stepping out of the shadow of Russian engineering, and one of the most interesting things about the recent aircraft reveals from China is the chance to see truly unusual airframes that are likely to be very different from their American, European, or Russian counterparts.
China has made the supercarrier obsolete. Is that not impressive? You know those Iskander missiles that have never been intercepted yet because they evade and allegedly can also drop countermeasures? Well, China has gliding anti-ship versions deliverable across half the planet. Is that not impressive?
No they have not.
I probably would not take either side of this bet.
I think the most impressive part of ballistic missiles (which are fairly simple) is the glide vehicle (as you mention) and also getting the guidance systems necessary for an anti-ship version to withstand the stress and heat of high-speed travel. Definitely very impressive, but essentially just pairing an antiship seeker with a ballistic missile. I tend to find the P-700 (fielded in the 1980s by the Soviet Union, designed to operate as part of a swarm targeting carriers) more conceptually interesting, although Dase may very well be correct that it is too clever by half.
Few modern Iranian missiles were intercepted in the last attack. Almost none. And these aren't as flat flying or as evasive as Iskander. Jamming satellites might work perhaps but it has inertial guidance so who knows how well..
That's your supposition, yank. Ask yourself what is a carrier group going to do when 128 maneuvering hypersonic glide vehicles appear over it.
Ask yourself how the carrier group is going to fare when it has what, 200 anti missiles. Even with perfect interception rates that's only 100 intercepted inbound missiles. Chinese LOVE large number production and they dug 1000kms of tunnels in mountains north of beijing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_China
They can shoot a lot of missiles out from China.
The earlier version solved this elegantly, the missiles just delivered guided bombs with a speed of
1000 m/s high up, maybe terminal 800 m/s. You can have seekers then no problem. It'd still probably work because100 of these would be very tough to intercept and even 5-10 hits would seriously degrade operations from a carrier. Ships are hard to sink but the internal operations aren't very redundant for reasons of space.I'm not sure how the later version solve this, the HGV ones.
I mean - the DF-series has limited range, and carriers give a fleet a huge advantage over hostile fleets even if they are forced to stay out of it. Having a floating airfield is pretty neat, and forcing them away from shore does not make them obsolete, it makes them less
Well this sort of assumes some things - I think you're smart enough to know about the kill chain problems with anti-ship ballistic missiles. The US has the same (perhaps better) apparatus to kill Chinese missile launchers that China does to kill carriers, does that make ASBMs obsolete? (The answer is no). I don't think this makes ASBMs useless or carriers invulnerable, it just means that they aren't some sort of magic invincible weapon.
Are you asking realistically, or at full capacity? At full capacity a single Burke can carry nearly 400 surface-to-air missiles if it is simply going for quantity by quad-packing ESSMs. Most likely it will be carrying a mix of anti-air and possibly anti-surface stand-off, and any carrier will likely be escorted by a Tico and two Burkes, maybe more. That's about 314 cells. So even if they don't have full cells because US industrial capacity sucks and some other cells are full of Tomahawks and ASROCs, I think you can guess something like 300 anti-air missiles conservatively (50 x cells dedicated to ESSM, 100 x dedicated to Standard, 100x Tomahawk, 50x empty or ASROC) before getting to SeaRAM/CIWS, and of course the carrier itself can carry hundreds of AMRAAMs and the new AIM-174 which can likely intercept anti-ship missiles.
Now, I don't rate the ESSM as much against ballistic missiles (although they might be useful in terminal defense, I suppose, apparently they can pull 30gs - but I would not count on them) - you're really looking to the Standards to provide you with air defense. Of course, if the Navy really intends to get dirty and play with ballistic missiles, they would know this and so, at the cost of a great deal of time, you might see them send two CBGs with something like two Ticos and a dozen Burkes (the Navy has more than 70). Both the SM-3 (of which the US has probably a couple hundred) and the SM-6 (of which the US probably has four-figures) have ABM capability in theory, so you could in theory put let's say 600 ABM-capable missiles on such a fleet easily.
And, since the carrier can generate strike packages outside of the known range of the DF-21 (albeit with great difficulty due to Dick Cheney canning the A-12 and advanced F-14 variants) the BIG question is if 500 Standards can intercept the DF-26s in the Chinese arsenal, assuming we want to split the difference with the carrier group and let it operate at extreme range rather than risk the more numerous DF-21. Assuming also that the Chinese haven't burned all of their DF-26s on Guam (which frankly is probably a better idea than trying to shoot at a carrier if China can catch the planes there on the ground) they have, what, 200 missiles to shoot at the carrier group realistically (launcher was revealed in 2015, I found a 2021 .mil source that said 100 missiles or so, so let's assume they've doubled that and ignore the question of how many of those are earmarked for nuclear warheads by assuming zero.)
Now in a "shoot shoot look shoot" doctrine the US can "shoot shoot look shoot" all 200 missiles.
I think intercepting ballistic missiles is hard and would personally prefer never to be in a situation where I was trusting my ABMs to intercept ballistic missiles. Even if you make optimistic assumptions (50% inception rate, for instance) you can still run into bad situations where leakers get through just due to bad "rolls" and contra your suggestion that 5-10 hits would seriously degrade operations from a carrier I am going to courageously suggest that even a single ballistic missile warhead will absolutely ruin a carrier's day unless it is very lucky.
Fortunately, the US Navy doesn't just have to rely on interceptors - the missiles will be using radar, most likely, for terminal targeting. [ETA: it looks like they are also believed to have optical sensors, which have both advantages and disadvantages over radar. I'd say this makes me slightly more bullish on the DF-series if true, but it's not as if optical systems are invincible either.] And radar sucks, modern ships could employ barrage or seduction jamming as well as decoys and chaff. My intuition is that this is especially true if they are actually going to descend on a glide profile rather than a straight-down profile, there are a lot of soft-kill options.
Now, you can sort of "adjust the sliders" to make the assumptions you want here - if you assume US softkill systems work reliably, then you barely need to worry. If you assume Chinese long-range sensors are neutralized early in the conflict, you barely need to worry. If you assume that the Standards will work poorly, or that the Chinese have say 300 or 500 DF-26s they are willing to launch at ships (neither of which seem implausible to me), then it starts to look much worse for the carriers.
All that being said: I would not want to be on a CBG that was going into DF-26 range. There are too many things that can go wrong, and ships don't have a lot of room for error. (This is...worse for China than for the United States in a Taiwan scenario). It's possible the US has Secret Sauce Technology that makes them much more confident in their carrier defense; the same is plausible for Chinese missiles. My main point in writing this up is simply to say - the situation is much more complex than simply "I have a missile with a 3000 mile range and an anti-ship guidance system, checkmate."
(As an aside, I found out while researching this long reply that the Chinese are latecomers to the ASBM game: the Soviets fired the first anti-ship ballistic missile in 1973.)
Also that China does have satellite dazzlers ready. In short US wouldn't be likely to acquire these launchers, wouldn't have much to hit them with - cruise missiles aren't great at following moving targets and also planes wouldn't be able to get near.
I am familiar with the SCUD hunt. I also know what SENTIENT is. Are you familiar with Soviet attempts to find carrier battle groups?
To establish air supremacy or superiority, yes. Obviously it did not take the Ukrainians weeks to penetrate the Russian air-defense grid once they got the right capabilities, nor would it take the US weeks to penetrate it if they wanted to.
I do not necessarily think stealth aircraft are the best assets the US has against mobile ballistic missile launchers. Nevertheless we've learned that modern air defense systems do not render even non-stealthy aircraft incapable.
Now frankly I think it would likely be stupid to waste munitions on something the size of a ballistic missile launcher that might move at any moment. (And my understanding is that US doctrine was actually to avoid striking Chinese launchers anyway.) But my point is that the US having the theoretical capability does not make the missile useless! I agree with you that there are countermeasures against targeting mobile ballistic missile launchers! It's hard to do!
And the US has ways of operating despite dazzlers - stealth satellites, [likely] high-altitude hypersonic recon/(strike?) aircraft, maneuvering spacecraft, non-optical recon satellites, some dude with a quadcopter, SIGINT, etc.
Moving the launchers around constantly is unlikely (although moving them consistently is). (And, for the record, at least some modern cruise missiles are capable of hitting moving targets, although I agree with you that the moving complicates matters.) But as I said above, I think it would be a dumb use of munitions. Which, again, goes to my point: having the theoretical ability to destroy something does not mean that such a course is easy, or even a good idea.
Really, everything you've said about hunting missile launchers is also true of hunting carriers, although carriers are much larger and more valuable targets, making them much more reasonable to target than a single ballistic missile launcher.
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