Technology AI, Science and New Things
The Biden administration – while not fighting for its own survival – is trying to prevent China getting the high-end chips it needs to compete in the race to AI supremacy. It’s working, but only just. The FT reports that despite US sanctions banning the export of the most powerful chips, Nvidia is on course to sell more than a million marginally less powerful ones to China this year, boosting its Chinese export earnings to $12 billion from $10.3 billion last year. The H20 chips proving so popular with Chinese buyers are specially designed to evade sanctions controls and compete with China’s home-made Huawei Ascend 910B chip. At $12-13,000 apiece they’re also much cheaper than Nvidia’s state-of-the-art H100 chips, which cost up to $30,000 each. US firms are closer to the holy grail of human-like artificial general intelligence, but their Chinese rivals are thriving anyway. Their biggest client, the state, wants AI chiefly for the easier job of surveillance.
