So the US recently has banned the exports of Nvidia's dedicated AI chips towards China, as part of an expanding US tech-blockade. The official rationale is that this will prevent China from having "advanced ai capabilities" or something. With the subtext being that the US is the arbiter of what kind of technology China is allowed to have.
In reality this cuts off Nvidia from the Chinese AI-chip market. With some delay Nvidia products will be replaced by domestically developed and produced Chinese Ai-chips. Effectively inverted-protectionism. Nvidia is currently overpoweringly dominant in the Ai-accelerator space. If normal capitalist market relations had continued, no Chinese competitor would have been able to establish it self as a serious contender against NVIDIA in this decade. The Sanctions will only prevent Nvidia from selling products in China it will not prevent the Chinese from doing industrial espionage.
China is a huge market 3-4 times larger than the US market. So this artificially created AI-chip vacuum will be filled by another Chinese tech-giant that will explosively grow in the next few years. We can compare this story with the Huawei tech giant (that makes networking infrastructure and cellphones). They could only grow through state subsidies, and it meant having to overcome market monopoly tendencies. This developmental-friction from the market-monopolization tendency has now been removed. The end result will be a Chinese AI-chip-giant becoming a global competitor that will to a significant extend eat Nvidia's lunch.
It used to be the case that in the imperial stage of capitalism, the imperial center would use it's power to impose monopoly exports onto the periphery at the behest of monopoly capitalists to crush potential competitors from the periphery. This tendency now seems to be inverting, and i don't understand why ?
I don't think this is caused by racial spooks of Chinese people lacking inventiveness, that's just a "un-creative ant-people yellow-peril" propaganda-narrative. Not all racists are dumb, there are quite a lot of intelligent ones that only believe their own lies to the extend that it benefits their interests. So what is motivating this ? They must know that what they are doing will slow down China's tech-sector in the present at the expense of tremendously speeding it up in the near future. That seems like a bad trade-off unless the short-term advantage in the here and now has a huge tra
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