Crypto_Lai

Jensen has said that America should have “the first, the most and the best” when it comes to Nvidia’s GPUs. He has consistently advocated for giving China less powerful versions of those GPUs long after they were first available in America. From my perspective, this seems like the best national defense policy for America as it lowers the odds of Huawei developing a competitive AI hardware ecosystem while keeping America ahead of China. Letting Chinese AI labs that are not affiliated with the Chinese military use cloud services in Southeast Asia is consonant with this. All of this can be turned off in an instant in the event of outright hostilities with China which would give America a significant advantage in any conflict. Definitionally, we would not have this advantage if China had a robust, Huawei led alternative AI hardware ecosystem. And completely restricting China’s access to American hardware would eventually result in the development of a different ecosystem that was not optimized for power efficiency given China’s surfeit of power. China is working on developing large optical scale-up domains, which require the laser substrates and power that China has in abundance. These optical scale-up domains can offset much of the superiority of individual American GPUs at a system level at the cost of consuming dramatically more power. The Huawei Atlas 960e has a 4096 chip optical scale-up domains vs. the 72 GPU scale-up domain in the NVL72. Giving China 1) limited access to GPUs inferior to those available in America and 2) China access to GPU cloud services in friendly Asian countries stalls this Chinese effort by disincentivizing Chinese labs from investing in the software and alternative model architectures required to exploit this very different system architecture. Reasonable minds can disagree about this, but important to note that officials in both the Biden and Trump administrations supported this policy and likewise officials in both administrations opposed it. Pretending that it is a simple question does everyone a disservice, which is why there is both bipartisan support and bipartisan opposition to the policy that Jensen has advocated. And all of this is why China restricts access to Nvidia GPUs. China understands all of the above and wants to develop its own alternative AI ecosystem that cannot be turned off in the event of a conflict. Chinese labs regularly complain to investors about being “GPU poor” and take pride in the fact that they are competitive despite their own government effectively tying their hands. I’m not sure what China hoped to gain from this espionage operation given they are restricting sales of Nvidia GPUs inside of China, but it is worth considering that having Jensen removed as the CEO of Nvidia might serve China’s own national security goals. Jensen expressed deep regret to his family and his colleagues for his actions while taking full responsibility for them. I think it is wise to defer further judgment until the board’s investigation has been completed. On a personal level, Jensen has been a friend of mine for many long years. I have never known him to be anything other than patriotic and deeply pro-American. He *always* says that his story would have only been possible in America.