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I still don't understand how exporting chips to China is supposed to help the US in the long run when the Chinese long run plan is to not import chips.
How is it not supposed to help? Money is good, market share is good. It reduces US trade deficit, providing funds for more useful things. Just 1 million chips is $25B, it's equal to the annual worth of those soy exports Trump frets so much about, it's like 5 times more than the much-hyped LNG boom. It derisks the circular investment bubble with NVidia as the nexus that's now a large part of US economy, and extends the timeline on which China stops importing them (ie the moment where domestic computing platforms are adopted by their top labs and shutting Nvidia out is not disruptive to DeepSeek V5 or Doubao-Seed 3 or whatever).
In a more relaxed geopolitical environment, they may not even stop 100%, just like they're still buying high-end Western CNC machines, despite being able to make functionally similar ones now. Nvidia will still have better yields, lower unit prices, higher power efficiency, more polished software, likely for decades. It's not like they have a philosophical commitment to not buy at all, they are simply focused on becoming strategically invulnerable to export controls after years of American gloating about how they'll fall behind and die, starting with Huawei.
The main argument against this has nothing to do with Chinese plans to stop buying chips later, it's just that they'll develop and deploy stronger AI at larger scale and secure some advantages in the short term, in the limit literally ASI. An auxiliary argument is that they will use extra compute to speed up the necessary research. That can be debated and weighed against standard economic arguments.
We were just discussing long vs short term thinking. Money and market share are the short term returns, the question is about the long term.
We're not in a more relaxed geopolitical environment. We're in an environment where China is doing everything it can to stimulate domestic chip production including by banning imports of certain chips in the first place, which sounds like a philosophical commitment to not buying at all to me.
If you believe that China is interested in being invulnerable to export controls and you believe that Nvidia use can lead to lock-in, it follows that China's strategy would be to avoid the lock-in in the first place, which means that there is no long term market for Nvidia chips in China.
Correct. I brought up the other argument in a previous thread where you responded with a non-sequitur about orange man having bad trade policy. Here I'm limiting myself strictly to your claim that chip exports would be beneficial in the long run for Nvidia.
I have the exact opposite view on this. Market share is the long term play – maybe 30 years. Your “long term” AGI supremacy play is a no-term Hail Mary premised on some dubious assumptions and, frankly, low IQ racism about Chinese capacity for independent R&D.
It's a philosophical commitment to independence. They enact protectionist measures for fledgling industries, and scale them down after achieving competitiveness, like they cut subsidies for EVs or batteries.
As I've repeatedly said, current Chinese AI software has low adoption, especially by talented collectives, and thus low development velocity; so long as it doesn't get adoption it doesn't matter if they can physically make good chips, they'll remain vulnerable to export controls and will have to do another multi-year moonshot after the next Democrat opportunistically cuts them off. H20 and RTX Pro 6000D are just not providing enough value to justify further software stagnation (not to mention reduced revenues to domestic manufacturers). H200, because it is both a powerful GPU and scales to large training clusters, seems to be marginally valuable enough so we see more nuanced regulation. After domestic chips become better than H200 (or rather, domestic systems + power subsidy become competitive with Nvidia clusters) and there's wide adoption of Huawei CANN and Cambricon NeuWare, I predict that they will relax controls on imported chips, maybe replacing it with a simple tariff. Your model suggests that they will tighten controls. It's an empirical matter, we will see in a matter of 2 years, most likely.
As explained above, it does not follow and you're refusing to understand what they're doing.
Hardly. If Chinese chips become better than the best Nvidia has to offer, there is, as you say, little reason to ban imports since approximately nobody will want to use them. EVs are a good example - how many Chinese people buy American EVs? I'd assume the number is approximately zero since American EVs are about 5x the price for a comparable product.
Of course, if Chinese chips are better than Nvidia's best, the prospects for Nvidia market share become quite slim. You seem to want it both ways - Nvidia exports to China will ensure Nvidia's dominance in China (lock in! Efficiency! Yields!), but also China is going to ensure that domestic chips are the market leader.
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