RIP American Tech Dominance

10 comments

1. Rogé Karma: “Donald Trump launched his political career by insisting that free-trade deals had sacrificed the national interest in the pursuit of corporate profits. One wonders what that version of Trump would make of his most recently announced trade policy. 

   “On Monday, he declared on Truth Social that the United States would lift restrictions on selling highly advanced semiconductors to China. In doing so, the president has effectively chosen to cede the upper hand in developing a technology that could determine the outcome of the military and economic contest between the U.S. and its biggest geopolitical rival.

   “The U.S. is currently ahead in the AI race, and it owes that fact to one thing: its monopoly on advanced computer chips. Several experts told me that Chinese companies are even with or slightly ahead of their American counterparts when it comes to crucial AI inputs, including engineering talent, training data, and energy supply. But training a cutting-edge AI model requires an unfathomable number of calculations at incredible speed, a feat that only a few highly specialized chips can handle. Only one company, the U.S.-based Nvidia, is capable of producing them at scale.

   “This gives the U.S. not only an economic advantage over China, but a military one. Already, AI systems have revolutionized how armies gather intelligence on enemies, detect troop movements, coordinate drone strikes, conduct cyberattacks, and choose targets; they are currently being used to develop the next generation of autonomous weapons. ‘Over the next decade, basically everything the military and intelligence communities do is going to some extent be enabled by AI,’ Gregory Allen, who worked on the Department of Defense’s AI strategy from 2019 to 2022, told me. This is why, in October 2022, the Biden administration decided to cut off the sale of the most advanced semiconductors to China. The aim of the policy, according to the head of the agency in charge of implementing it, was ‘to protect our national security and prevent sensitive technologies with military applications from being acquired by the People’s Republic of China’s military, intelligence, and security services.’

   “The policy seems to have done its job. Chinese AI firms tend to explicitly cite export controls as one of the biggest obstacles to their growth. DeepSeek, the Chinese company that earlier this year introduced an AI model nearly as good as those made by the leading American firms, is the exception that proves the rule. At first, DeepSeek’s progress was taken as evidence that restricting China’s access to advanced chips was a failed project. However, the company turned out to have trained its model on thousands of second-tier Nvidia chips that it had acquired via a loophole that wasn’t closed until late 2023. DeepSeek’s AI model would have been even better if the company had had access to more and better Nvidia chips. ‘Money has never been the problem for us,’ Liang Wenfeng, one of DeepSeek’s founders, told a Chinese media outlet last year. ‘Bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.’”

   Read more: [https://theatln.tc/cNbcXRpD](https://theatln.tc/cNbcXRpD)

2. the “rip american tech dominance” framing assumes china even wants to be dependent on american chips long term, which… they don’t lol

   the whole point of their strategy is indigenization. after watching what happened with huawei and the constant threat of export controls shifting with each administration, why would any chinese strategist build critical infrastructure around components that are tied to the whims of the US? that’s just handing the US a kill switch.

   plus if you have abundant cheap power (which china is building aggressively), horizontal scaling with less efficient chips can match vertical scaling with bleeding edge ones.

   quantity has a quality of its own.

3. The EU companies sold their IPs for short term profits and market access to China. Look where they are now, permanently behind. I hope the US doesn’t make the same mistake.

4. Definitely a leveled headed and prudent article title and not at all a desperate grab for attention for a dying medium.

   This doesn’t even jive with the CCP’s recent moves to curb H200 for domestic Ai growth.

5. Top 7 US Tech Companies Value: $21.5 Trillion
   China Total GDP: $19.8 Trillion
   AI Chip Global Market Share
   USA: 98%
   China: 2%
   Cloud Computing Global Market Share
   USA: 65%
   China: 5%
   Total Data Centers (Facilities)
   USA: ~5,300
   China: ~450
   Private AI Investment
   USA: $67 Billion
   China: $8 Billion
   Major AI Model Releases
   USA: 42
   China: 12

   Good luck

6. Sure bro

7. This article has so much FUD

8. Who are these several experts? And no china is not ahead at the moment. 

9. When Trump bans chip sale: It’ll give China economical incentive to make their own chips. RIP American tech domiance.

   When Trump unbans chip sale: It’ll give China the computational power they need. RIP American tech domiance.

   If you made your conclusion first you can fit any narrative in.

10. >>… lift restrictions on selling highly advanced semiconductors to China.

    This is good. First, the risk that China would use these chips to develop their own chips has already passed.

    When America first instituted export controls, it was an attempt to slow this progress down. One needs to remember that the U.S.-China market has been open to each other since the 70s, and this only accelerated into the 90s. China has had access to the knowledge needed to produce chips for decades. This was not an issue, although it was a noted concern, for the US up until China began industrial indigenization efforts, which was publicly presented in 2015 as the Made In China 2025 initiative. Five years later, Trump institutes a sweeping chip ban in 2020, and then reverses it in 2025, leading to today. The reasons as to why, we can only speculate as outside observers.

    But reversing export controls on chips is not the “end” of American tech dominance.

    What would be the “end” of American tech dominance is if American technology companies are stifled from access to global markets to sell their products. This is another reason why it seems that various establishments in America are grumbling at the EU — the regulation of their access to the European market.

    Conversely, China wants continued access to American high technology, the cheapest and most efficient path to developing their own indigenous alternatives, in much the same way that America needed access to British industrial power in the late 19th century. America transferred great amounts of technology, knowledge, and industry to China after opening relations with them in 1979. Whole swathes of knowledge from American industrial giants like Ford, GM, GE, Honeywell, etc were shipped over to China.

    The strategic analysts in China know that their continued economic growth is contingent on their relationship with the US.

    Poor African states can only serve as release valves for Chinese exports.

    Russia is a strategic competitor to China in Asia.

    And the greater East Asia, while great trade and business partners, are ultimately *mercenary* in their relationship with China.

    Economic ties are no replacement for inter-government cooperation and joint-development, especially at high levels of the military and state.

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