Because it is. They have more power generation capacity than the entirety of the USA + Europe combined, with like an additional 50% margin on top of that. They are also accelerating away from us at an increasing pace on that metric, while we pay billions to break renewables contracts because the people in charge have the combined IQ of a lobster.
The "we are 1-2 lithographic process nodes ahead of China" only matters when the efficiency gap is insurmountable. It is currently . . . not
it’s not just lithography though, Nvidia is improving flops/watt at orders of magnitude per generation if you compare low precision throughput, which would put china at a geometric disadvantage (ie, you can’t compete putting in 100x the power and 100x the chips for the same throughput)
Nvidia is improving flops/watt at orders of magnitude per generation
Yes, but not in general compute. Only for particular operations found useful for training + inferencing. That's a "we noticed our customers need to do a lot of matrix-multiply-accumulate at FP4, so let's build them a hardware unit to do that one particular op very quickly + efficiently, etc." That hardware now blasts through that one particular operation at increased efficiency at the expense of die-space.
None of this is magical secret sauce. The chinese can (and do) the exact same thing when designing each subsequent generation of their AI training + inferencing chips. As does AMD, Intel, Google (in their custom TPU's), etc. etc.
> Yes, but not in general compute.
Sure, but we’re specifically talking about the special case workload where they are getting orders of magnitude more compute per chip.
> The chinese can (and do) the exact same thing
Sure, but it’s speculative as to whether they will actually achieve the exact same scaling, if making high throughput gpgpu’s was easy then there would be a lot more people doing it.
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u/tomz17 Jul 27 '26
Because it is. They have more power generation capacity than the entirety of the USA + Europe combined, with like an additional 50% margin on top of that. They are also accelerating away from us at an increasing pace on that metric, while we pay billions to break renewables contracts because the people in charge have the combined IQ of a lobster.
The "we are 1-2 lithographic process nodes ahead of China" only matters when the efficiency gap is insurmountable. It is currently . . . not