US microchip export controls, introduced last year to freeze China’s development of nuclear weapons supercomputers and artificial intelligence systems such as ChatGPT, have reportedly had little impact on China’s technology sector.China slowed but did not stop
The rules restricted the shipment of Nvidia and AMD chips to China, which had become the global technology industry standard for the development of chatbots and other artificial intelligence systems. However, Nvidia broke the rules in a sense by producing slowed variants of its chips for the Chinese market to comply with US rules. Even slowed-down Nvidia chips represent an improvement for Chinese firms. Tencent Holdings, one of China’s largest tech companies, said last month that systems using Nvidia’s slowed-down H800 would more than halve the time it takes to train its largest AI system.
“The AI companies we spoke with see this handicap as relatively minor and manageable,” said Charlie Chai, a leading industry analyst. Frankly, it’s hard to slow China’s high-tech progress without hurting US companies. By restricting China’s access to high-end US technologies, rather than completely blocking it, the US aims for the country to fall back over time.As a result, US firms continue to trade with China and ship different, slower versions of their current hardware to the country. While the throughput and chip-to-chip transfer speeds of shipped chips have been significantly reduced, experts say these handicaps will only cost more time and money. Spending more money is not a problem for companies like Alibaba, Baidu or Tencent. Ultimately, on the other hand, the US slowed down China’s AI industry, but the sanctions certainly couldn’t do more than that.
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