U.S. blocks sale of AMD's China chip | Hacker News Reader

U.S. blocks sale of AMD's China chip

fortune.com

10 pointsjonbaer10 comments

The Commerce Department, and the "deep state" in general, have made increasingly clear that--like the CCP--they view dominance in cutting-edge semiconductors as a national security imperative. Note that this extends far beyond political appointees; regardless of who wins the election in November, this policy stance is unlikely to change.

So "everyone" knows that they can't sell these things to China. But investors have some wi$hful thinking that they can just legally juke the Commerce Department regulations.

I think NVidia and AMD are just posturing with these products, knowing they'll get slapped down by Commerce, so they can turn around to their investors and say, "Oh well, we tried..." without taking the stock price hit that would come with investors fully pricing in the China semiconductor embargo.

Perhaps AMD should have waited until after the election in November. Nobody wants to give political opponents any ammunition about being 'soft on China'.

so i have a question for all americans on this forum. if this is acceptable behavior and everyone should you know, just suck it up and accept this, why the hypocrisy if afghanistan government decided to kill domains and everyone was furious? or indian court ordering bloomberg to take down an article which it found defamatory? or china exercising their sovereign right in say, GFW or a country policing their internet space or anything on the spectrum?

I don’t think it’s acceptable. I also don’t like the built-in guardrails and closed-sourcing approach to AI currently to stop the robot from saying the n-word, so my problem isn’t with American exceptionalism so much as using “safety” as a means of limiting innovation is trite.

It's a good question. My opinion as an American isn't definative, but I'll offer my viewpoint.

The primary reason most Americans would not care comes down to policy. There are thousands of things that we refuse to export to China, and adding a few computers to the list wouldn't raise any eyebrows. Both major political parties are strategically invested in Taiwan, so there is a bipartisan motivation to pass tough-on-China policies. It's definitely arbitrary, but not unwarranted; China invoked this through territorial aggression.

The rest of your examples would probably make even the least-patriotic Americans laugh. The right to self-determination is not an invitation to Maoist-Famine your entire population. There are humanitarian (as well as territorial and political) implications to a nation's actions, especially when it takes up arms against it citizens or defends a mistake of international concern. Very few remaining Americans share your anti-globalist mindset - tragically, the few who do are obsessed with American exceptionalism all the same.

I hope that could help. Words can't describe how nuanced the American national sentiment is, there are layers of secularism and faux-support that are overriden by completely different ideals. It's not much different from most places in the end though, I'd imagine.

No chip company can survive the loss of the World's largest chip market.

The whole of the West is only two-thirds the size of China.

Give it 4-5 years till China is making chips the equal or better of AMD's chips, AMD and other Western chip companies will disappear. Enjoy AMD while you can.

and they are manufactured in Taiwan... this might not end well.

the US has taken a much bigger interest Taiwan since AI became important to national security.

At least, probably.

China too, it seems.

We knew it wasn’t going to end well when America helped the world rebuild itself instead of taking it over after WW2 when we had nukes and nobody else did.

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