Editorial | Export curbs or not, Trump’s America can’t slow China’s tech surge
US debate over how to contain China’s tech development is irrelevant as Chinese domestic industry development has already taken full flight
Trump likes the deal because it entitles the US government to a share of the profits. His critics, though, have argued the new policy will help advance an adversarial near-peer nation.
Defenders say China was actually forced to rapidly develop its home-grown chip and AI industries since Biden’s chip ban. Making China more reliant on Western technologies may be more effective in slowing it down. They are dangling chips such as Nvidia’s H200 before the Chinese as inducement.
Trump’s change of course is not a free-for-all; the most advanced chips such as Nvidia’s top-end Blackwell and forthcoming Rubin chips will still be restricted. However, the debate in Washington is mostly irrelevant as far as the Chinese are concerned. The time to contain China technologically – or generally as on all fronts – is past; that ship has long sailed.
John Martinis, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize for physics, has said China is “nanoseconds” behind the United States in quantum computing and is fiercely competitive in AI.
Some Chinese AI developers and tech firms will use Nvidia’s H200 chips as a quick fix or shortcut, but Beijing is fully committed to promoting domestic chip development and usage. Chinese competitors such as Huawei, Cambricon, Moore Threads and MetaX are developing their own powerful chips. If Trump and Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang think the H200 chip and its likes will derail China’s chip ambitions, they are likely to be disappointed. Huawei’s Ascend 910C and Alibaba’s PPU 2.0 could catch up with Nvidia’s H200.