What does DS achieve with this "tactical move"? Or, are you saying this is a tactical move from a higher level (Chinese gov interests)?
What country produces all of the ASICs used in contemporary bitcoin mining?
The faster we get to a good enough open model, the sooner it gets burned to hardware, and the sooner the transition to (relatively) low tech, low margin, high volume cards to run it on …
… and those are built in China.
You're not going to make money buying a new 14nm bitcoin miner, and that is where the China foundries are for cost effective silicon. They're great at 28nm+ and good at 22nm pricing.
Most new design modern sub 7nm ASICs are made in Taiwan/Korea by TSMC and SLSI. That is where miners are profitable.
If they had a solution to get to >90% yields on sub 5nm they'd be doing it now. They don't, even the 7-10nm isn't there. Best hope is they get to buy the entire world's supply of EUV in 2027, then they install all of them, then they bring them up, then they build processes around them and make masks, then they ramp the yield on 3-4nm by copying exact TSMC.
The hilarious thing is that TSMC couldn't do this at a new fab in Taiwan, with full access to equipment, supply chain, and people. So, nope.
Thinking on, I agree 1-2 years was too optimistic. Even if they have the tech right now already, building a fab itself within 2 years is tight, but I think doable. Maybe not at full capacity but at least functioning. It's possible they can start building the fab infra in parallel with acquiring EUV tech speculatively to speed it up.
Like the other person said, within 4-5 years is more reasonable.
From that point onwards, we'll buy Chinese hardware or be left behind
Already, the big capabilities are becoming multi-layer/die integration. Whether it's BSPDN, stacked die, optical interconnects, etc it won't be as simple as Denard scaling. It will be dependent on experience and supply chains, which are harder to transfer than equipment or IP.
I do think the market for inference will drive a lot of innovation, and a lot of that will be at larger nodes. A single reticle die masked ROM with CIM can do 7B at 6nm. At 2-3nm you can do 27-32B which is a single expert or router. At that point there's not much reason to shrink for AI since it's mostly 1-hot die per token (except for the router). Update the parameters every 3-6mo when a new frontier comes out, and take the cost/power savings to the bank.
Cheap labor from foreign countries is good.
Can anyone explain how this is not hypocrisy?