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Letting China buy advanced chips at this point could cripple Chinese companies and could benefit the foreign makers, could this be a reality of commercial warfare that has been going on for years? Should we support embargoes that allow/force China to build up a substantial and competitive high-tech industry? Any thoughts or comments appreciated.
I think it could be a 'wash' in terms of slowing them down.
China developed it's own WiFi standards, a few years after using 'foreign' WiFi chips to power it's networks. They did this to reduce reliance on foreign technology, promote "social harmony" through control of communications, and to reduce the cost of networking in China.
Some years later they did exactly the same with CPUs -- both with their fully internally developed CPUs (certainly a combo fo home-grown and stolen IP), and then later enhanced it via a licensing agreement with AMD for a version of the first Zen architecture.
China is certainly advancing it's own ability to build advanced memory types too.
These products were never restricted in any meaningful way for export to China, and they developed them domestically anyway for various reasons.
If we exported advanced chips - we'd make some more money and maybe slow down their domestic output. OTOH, in theory, the more we sell them the more readily they'll be able to clone it - especially really hard stuff like EUV machines from ASML.
So I think it doesn't really matter too much in the long run, basically if a company wants to profit off of Chinese buyers -- they need to innovate more quickly than China, and be allowed to export. Otherwise, China will just eventually domestically source the supply anyway, even if it's not the same quality or capability.
..
P.S. We also need to rework some of our own licensing and patent laws. It's a very long story, and not entirely related to patents -- but it was a licensing agreement within the Canada and the US for Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that handed China absolute dominance in the production of EV and home storage batteries. Also note - I think ideally China should produce some things the US can't and vice-versa -- then we can trade, and.. have peace through mutual dependancy.
Letting China buy advanced chips at this point could cripple Chinese companies and could benefit the foreign makers, could this be a reality of commercial warfare that has been going on for years? Should we support embargoes that allow/force China to build up a substantial and competitive high-tech industry? Any thoughts or comments appreciated.
i am afraid that's a wishful thinking. china is pulling full speed ahead in their own internal technology development while getting hands on whatever they can buy
I think if we let nVidia and AMD have free rein, it will indeed slow down their local efforts very, very significantly. While the companies in China have to follow government edicts, competition between them is pure, unadulterated capitalism. If Alibaba/Bytedance/Tencent can buy Hoppers and Blackwells, they are not going to buy one chip from Cambricon; and they didn't and for many years, Cambricon had minuscule revenue with little growth. Now Huawei is a bit different, they have enough resources to play the long game, but still, without volume, no business can learn and grow as fast.
But with full access to hardware, they will be able to develop the actual AI with even fewer obstacles, and we will face many more Deekseek moments or worse, it sure is a hard equation to solve.
i am afraid that's a wishful thinking. china is pulling full speed ahead in their own internal technology development while getting hands on whatever they can buy
The more money they spend buying imports allow less money for developing home grown solutions and the more money foriegn companies make to advance research.
The argument isn’t completely wrong, but it overstates how cleanly money substitutes for capability. Buying advanced chips and tools does not linearly reduce China’s incentive or ability to develop domestic technology—there is another side of the coin: Imports accelerate learning, benchmarking, talent training, and system integration, while state funding for “indigenous” development is largely policy-driven, not budget-constrained.
The so-called "big fund" is essentially a high-tech gamble to catch up with the world's cutting-edge high-tech gamble with the monthly pension of 20 dollars for rural farmers.
At the same time, unrestricted access clearly strengthens western suppliers’ R&D and delays substitution pressure. So sanctions do impose real long-term costs on China—but only when they are tight, sustained, and cover choke points, not when they are porous. Partial access tends to produce the worst outcome: China still learns, foreign firms still profit, and dependency persists longer than expected.
