The United States has a solution to prevent China from overtaking them and it goes through Nvidia

news hardware The United States has a solution to prevent China from overtaking them and it goes through Nvidia

The United States VS China: the technological race

China faces US restrictions, which imposed a law to prevent Chinese companies from sourcing overly advanced computing equipment. The United States wants to maintain its technological edge, while China has been advancing extremely quickly for the past few years. Joe Biden’s country obviously has some technological edge, particularly on the side of supercomputers and other machines that can benefit from artificial intelligence.

It was US National Councilor Jack Sullivan who proposed China’s containment plan last September.

When it comes to export control, we cannot limit ourselves to the sole aim of maintaining relative advantages over our competitors for certain key technologies. We’ve long had a “sliding scale” approach that assumes we need to be a few generations ahead. This no longer corresponds to the strategic environment in which we find ourselves today.

The United States produces only 12% of semiconductors, while China produces three quarters. The two countries are not at war, of course, but both are fighting a real technological battle. Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave a speech discussing how the United States would view China now.

We will not try to stop China from its maj or powers if we want to stop it – or any other country in their economic growth that could benefit their people. But we will uphold and strengthen international laws, our agreements and our institutions to maintain that peace and security and continue to protect people’s individual rights and ensure that we work with China – and all other countries.

The country doesn’t want to limit trade with China entirely, but wants to ensure that the “peace is preserved,” which it says is maintained by this technological competition on an equal footing.

Nvidia found a solution

But in th is case, trade is not interrupted, and therefore private companies have a keen interest in maintaining their exports to other countries, including China, which is very fertile ground.

This is the case of Nvidia, the famous company that makes GeForce graphics cards. The company is already well established in China, but is reflected in American legislation. Nvidia had to work around the problem and the solution was pretty simple but effective.

Nvidia has developed an electronic chip, the A800, a variant of the A100, that reroutes the problem. In fact, the A100 is considered too powerful to be sold to Chinese companies, which is why Nvidia is offering a restricted chip to keep selling its products in China.

The interconnect interface ranges from 600 Gb/s to 400 Gb/s on the A800, which is just below US government-approved performance. The United States is concerned and dares not imagine what artificial intelligence China could produce in the years to come. Obviously, other brands such as Intel or Apple are likely to follow the trend in the coming months.