• Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    My conclusion is that the US is getting what it wants out of the importation block regardless of smuggling or “fell of the assembly line”.

    Universities (China and the US) want a warranty on that hardware. They can’t get a warranty on smuggled hardware. That’s where you would have researchers building models. The GPUs they have are getting old and they don’t have replacements lined up.

    The other place to build models is corporations, who might choose to ignore the warranty issue, but they can’t possibly get enough high end GPUs to actually do that. Not while using mules who can only bring in one or two at a time. Maybe they can find a way to smuggle things en masse, but they’d likely just make themselves a target to US trade authorities.

    That leaves Chinese gamers as the only ones who want smuggled GPUs at all. US trade policy doesn’t give a shit about them.

    So yes, there’s smuggling, Nvidia certainly knows about it, US trade authorities certainly know about it, but nobody has any reason to care.