U.S. Bans Sales of Nvidia's H100, A100 GPUs to Middle East

&gt; Now, the U.S. government is concerned is that Nvidia&#x27;s A100 and H100 compute GPUs could be diverted to China from customers in the Middle East.<p>Sounds like eventually they&#x27;re gonna have to ban the sale of those GPU to any country that doesn&#x27;t start with the letter U and ends with SA, if they truly want to avoid anyone in China getting a hold of those.

When has China become &quot;Middle East&quot; and does it means that these GPUs will be banned in Israel as well?

This type of ban has the unintended consequence of strengthening&#x2F;accelerating the domestic market of the party you are trying to sanction. This has happened with Turkey (F35&#x2F;TF-x, Patriot&#x2F;Hisar-Siper, the whole UAV&#x2F;UCAV programmes etc.) and currently happening with China (them acquiring investing in foundry know how and capacity, Huawei investing in its own OS). Would be exciting to see what this one will bring.

I think the US is weaponizing Nvidia under the disguise of security, but it&#x27;s just trying to squash competition. That sets a bad precedence in my opinion. The world will come to rely less on the US products and services. Free markets are less free. International cooperation is harder. It becomes us vs them.

Probably directed at Saudi Arabia. Surefire way to send even more business to Huawei.

I understand the reasoning but it’s weird that while we’ve expeced continual progress in flops every year or so, this will now put basically a mandatory upper limit (forever?) on how powerful computers can be (in these countries)

&quot;free trade&quot;

I can&#x27;t figure out if this was legit or American businesses trying to get the price of GPUs down.<p>China probably doesn&#x27;t even need them.<p>The reason we need so many in the West is because of the nature of capitalistic competition. Datacenters are full of GPUs next to each other (or even the same one just time divided) serving companies who are trying to beat the other out and gain customers<p>If one put even a fraction of all the compute used to make the current landscape into one foundational model (which they don&#x27;t have to bother to build safety for nor pay alignment tax on) it would probably make gpt4 look like gpt2.<p>Not to mention they don&#x27;t have to give the average person access to anything, they can invoke their MaoAI only for governmental purposes and just the rest a simple 6B model or something.