8.3.25
Nvidia has ordered 300,000 new top-line computer chips from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) following a huge boost in demand from China. The agreement over the H20 chipsets, which are some of the most advanced technology being produced in Taiwan's industry-leading factories, comes in the same month that Trump reversed a ban that stopped Nvidia from selling to China over security concerns. The January launch of DeepSeek, a Chinese-made AI model, , sparked what may have called a "cold war" over artificial intelligence development. Researchers developed DeepSeek with a fraction of the resources but managed to produce an AI capable of rivaling ChatGPT. In April, the Trump administration barred top U.S. suppliers, like Nvidia, from selling topline silicon to China over "national security concerns." The ban mirrored the 2022 CHIPS Act passed by former President Joe Biden, which increased semiconductor manufacturing in the U.S. while also clamping down on chip companies investing in China and Russia, the biggest competitors in the industry.
The White House reversed its ban after barely three months, giving Nvidia the all-clear in July to resume sales with China. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang on July 14 said the U.S. government had assured him it would restore the licenses to sell H20s in China. The return of Nvidia chips to the Chinese market will be a boon to the country's rapidly expanding AI industry, but there's concern that the U.S. could fall behind in an AI "race", as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman describes it, using U.S. chips to do so. In May, a report from the Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology shared with Newsweek found that two of China's leading AI institutes, headquartered in Beijing, have established branches in Wuhan to cooperate on sophisticated alternatives to the large generative AI models. The report described the new labs' aim to "springboard to artificial general intelligence", overtaking the U.S. by focusing on other forms of AI as opposed to the western focus on large statistical models.
www.newsweek.com
