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Notes -
Minor update on the US-PRC tech competition.
Culture war significance: it matters for the grand strategy understanding and the narrative of the US as the Main Character of History. Personally, I had stopped regularly engaging on this forum when it became clear that the US is, in fact, not such a Main Character (at least for the moment), but just a great power with massive momentum and cultural influence. Not being American, I mainly only care about American cultural affairs insofar as they have global spillover effects. Local legislation news and woke-MAGA strife are overwhelmingly noise for the world, unless they reach some critical volume like peak woke or BLM did. Some American tech, and related politics, is very much not noise. The chip war in particular is very high-signal, so I follow it closely.
It seems something happened behind the scenes after those events in October, when the US Department of Commerce went with the Affiliate Rule, China retaliated with REE+ export controls, and soon enough, by November 1, we've got the usual Trump style Deal. (There's also a subplot with Nexperia/Wingtech, that demonstrates Chinese supply chain power and European ineptitude again, with a similar outcome of the Western actor retreating). Suddenly, on Dec 8, we get the news about Trump permitting the sales of H200 to China (context and understandable rationalist perspective here). China reacts somewhat paradoxically, if your theory of their mind is just «they're desperate for our chips» – as per the FT, «Companies seeking to purchase the H200 would need to submit a request explaining why they cannot use domestically produced chips and undergo an approval process», in continuation of their earlier scrutiny, rejections and negative publicity directed at H20s.
10 days later Reuters breaks the news – which were not quite news for those in the know – about Chinese successes with their EUV effort. The article is somewhat confused, as almost all reporting on Chinese AI and IC tech is; from my private sources, the situation has already moved further on multiple components, like optics and metrology.
What I want to emphasize here is that it's not just trivial «industrial espionage» or IP theft. Their light source project is led by former ASML head of light source technology and «Light source competence owner for metrology in ASML research» Lin Nan. I think that he returned not just for money, nationalism or career opportunities, but because China offered him a more ambitious challenge – he seems interested in solid state lasers, which ASML, constrained by market incentives more than strategic considerations, gave up on. For sure, straightforward IP theft also happens - CXMT's DRAM/HBM progress is apparently propped up by Samsung IP which was, well, illicitly transfered by former employees. And there's very substantial domestic talent pipeline, though people are prone to dismiss their patent/paper counts; they lack brand power, «Changchun Institute of Optics» doesn't have the same zing to it as Zeiss, though you may see it in the news soon.
All in all, China is moving far faster than even I imagined. Now we get reports – straining my credulity, to be honest – that ByteDance doesn't expect Nvidia to sell move than a few hundred thousand cards in China, not because of any trade barriers from either side, but because adequate domestic competition will come online in mid-2026 already. Almost certainly it'll be worse and less power-efficient, at least. But clusters with Chinese hardware are eligible for electricity subsidies, and that may be enough to tip the scales? This logic is corroborated by the surprisingly low leaked price of H200s – just $200.000 for an 8-card module (not sure if that's before of after 25% Trump Tax, but in any case very low, maybe lower than in the US proper, at least pre-tax). Meanwhile that's 5 times more bang for the buck than H20s offered. On the other hand, for now Nvidia is selling old stock; new production is being discussed, but at this rate I don't expect the price to increase. One can reasonably ask if this makes any sense, given that the demand in the US outstrips supply. I think it does, both for complex strategic reasons (mainly ecosystem lock-in, which is in fact a big deal, as I explain here) and simply because the US AI market is becoming a very convoluted circular Ponzi scheme where Nvidia de facto subsidizes companies to buy Nvidia wares. That's more of a potential market meltdown recipe than a revenue source. H200 sales to China, for what it's worth, unambiguously pull in dollars, and both Jensen's fudiciary duty and Trump's deficit-slashing mandate (and to be blunt, likely Trump's corruption) create a strong incentive to greenlight them.
Anyway, what looked like Chinese bluffing and negging at the time the sale of H20s was debated looks more and more like genuine, coherent industrial policy. China is pretty sure it'll have sovereignty in the entire stack of AI development, soon enough, that it will even be capable enough to export its AI hardware products, and the US is acting as if that is likely true – as if the competition is about market share and revenue. They are obviously compute-constrained right now, so DeepSeek V3.2 only catches up to around GPT-5 level, with the usual complaints in the paper. They don't appear to mind this enough to bow and scrape for more American chips at any cost. A large component here is that what they need, they can often rent overseas openly –
– but I think it's primarily about confidence in the domestic supply chain.
Long before all these events, in September, we had a debate with @aquota here, when the topic was selling China relatively worthless H20s. (For my previous take on H20s specifically see here).
He argued:
To which I've replied:
It seems to me that my read on the situation from back then, both the big picture and its implications for compute strategy, is now shared by both the USG and the CPC. The former is trying to regain its position and revenue in the Chinese GPU market and slow down Huawei/Cambricon/Kunlun/etc. ecosystem development by flooding the zone with mature Nvidia chips that will be adopted by all frontier players (eg DeepSeek again – they have a deep bench of Nvidia-specific talent and aren't willing to switch to half-baked Ascend CANN). The latter is more worried about preventing the US from doing that than about gaining moar FLOPS in the short run.
In conclusion, I want to congratulate Americans again with having found a true peer, for the first time since the decline of the British empire. Germans, Japanese and my own people had failed to provide enough stimulation, so Americans have grown lonely and fat at the top.
Aquota said:
I do not, in fact, "understand" this. Like, that may be the case and we'll just have Pax Sinica. I'm okay with it but I'm not Sinophilic enough to expect it. Even reduced to "just a great power", the US is poised to remain a historical force.
For now the loss of the indisputable Main Character status is being processed traumatically, with anger, denial and exaggeration of the costs of that loss if it were to really happen. But as its reality sinks in, this trauma may become fertile grounds for some cultural Renaissance in the United States. Less capeshit, more self-awareness. I may even come to care about it for reasons aside from global consequences.
…Of course, we can still entertain the hypothesis that all of the above is some interesting ephemera and this final dash of the Chosen Nation towards AGI-powered Rapture and completion of history is the real story of the times. I won't completely discount it, we shall see.
Does it even matter who wins this industrial competition? It might as well be a football game between foreign nations to me, and you. I just want to be, a swiss. To live comfortably without an overlord. If pikes no longer suffice, nukes.
When the japanese and south koreans copied and then bested american cars and german optics and swiss watches, did the americans and germans and swiss subsequently sink into poverty? No, they just got richer. It has never been a zero-sum game. Believers in zero-sum games end up playing negative-sum games.
I don't know what the Swiss thought of it, but Americans absolutely had a psychotic meltdown about Japanese competition. I think you don't get how intoxicating the sense of supremacy is. Switzerland is just a nation, its manufactures are just manufactures, it operates on the logic of comparative advantage. Americans have an ideological stake in being Number One.
Half of congress in the 80s had literally fought Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese hostility was far from purely economic.
China was at best a secondary antagonist in the Cold War (and no longer after 1972). Korea is little remembered, before the memory of almost all living Americans and the present state of North Korea means that most people have no idea of how involved the PLA was. So the last ‘real war’ that was USA vs China was what, the Boxer Rebellion?
It could change if Xi panics and decides to abandon the slow game for Taiwan (which would be surprising) by staging the most audacious possible invasion involving a first strike at American bases, but even in the event of a ground invasion (unlikely) I consider that relatively unlikely.
Some grand global game of competition in which AMERICA NUMBA ONE just doesn’t really exist in the minds of most Americans in the way it does for the Chinese or even for, say, the French. American identity is tied to more amorphous things that don’t really have anything to do with global affairs like the Wild West and country music. A Dane or Swiss will gladly lecture you on why Denmark or Switzerland is the best country on earth (both would be mostly correct). Americans don’t really do that except in a very tongue in cheek Team America World Police way and even that is mostly limited to the middle class.
Italians abroad will talk about Ferrari and Columbus and pasta. Americans abroad don’t really lecture anyone about Google and Microsoft and Chevron. It’s not shame in the German way, but it’s not really pride either; global economic and cultural hegemony just isn’t central to American self-conception.
Eh, the political class really does have Main Character Syndrome, in the sense that you hear things like "Venezuela is evading sanctions." Um, yeah? Venezuela is not, in fact, part of the US. US law does not apply in Venezuela.
The deliberate pretension of inability to comprehend this sort of thing is something the political class will have to come to grips with as the relative strength of US power wanes.
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Americans don't do that because we don't need to. We know we're number one, we know everyone else (especially the French, who hate it, but excepting the Chinese) knows we're number one, and there's no point in arguing about it.
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