Trump suddenly softened his stance on China, giving two lofty reasons, thinking he was pulling the wool over everyone's eyes, but ended up being exposed by his own people. There are ulterior motives behind this move, and the fundamental reason is that Trump discovered a secret about China.
NVIDIA
As is well known, Trump has recently suddenly softened his stance on China, allowing China to purchase high-end chips from NVIDIA, the H200. This move immediately shocked the tech industry, as Trump had previously refused to sell even the lower-performance H20 to China. Now, he has lifted the ban on the H200, which is said to be six times more powerful than the H20.
The official reasons given by Trump were lofty. On one hand, it was for revenue, as Trump would take a quarter of the profits from the trade between China and NVIDIA. On the other hand, he claimed to have opened his mind, focusing on developing more advanced chips in the U.S. With this explanation, the outside world believed it, as recent Sino-U.S. relations have been good, and some media interpreted it as a major shift in the U.S. policy toward China's technology.
However, at this critical moment, U.S. media released a piece of information that broke the silence. The report pointed out that what Trump said were just polite words, and the real reason for the relaxation was not that. Instead, it was due to the "ace" revealed by Chinese enterprises, the CloudMatrix 384AI system. According to U.S. sources, this system has already matched NVIDIA's top architecture.
H200 Chip
This means that China has caught up with the U.S. in terms of technology, or even surpassed it. More shockingly, in June this year, the U.S. evaluated that the enterprise could produce only 200,000 Ascend series chips per year, but by next year, the enterprise's annual production capacity will reach a million.
This clearly tells the U.S. that the Chinese market is no longer a situation where "without American chips, you can't play." Trump suddenly relaxing the restrictions is, on one hand, out of necessity. Continuing the blockade has little impact on China, so such a complicated blockade loses its practical significance.
Domestic Chips
On the other hand, U.S. sources stated that Trump's move was not entirely willing. The report said that the U.S. government's hawkish faction hopes to quickly capture the Chinese market by exporting large quantities of H200 to China, thereby suppressing Chinese enterprises. In plain language, it's a last large-scale "market dumping" before Chinese technology becomes fully mature and consolidates the market, making Chinese-produced chips lose the Chinese market.
This is a typical example of a "strategic shift after the failure of containment." Over four years, NVIDIA's market share in China's AI chip market dropped from 95% to 50%, and by October this year, it completely exited the advanced AI chip market, with zero share. Trump gradually realized that strict sanctions had actually become the strongest "catalyst" for China's technological self-reliance. Huang Renxun was right.
Trump and Huang Renxun
However, Huang Renxun's words that make sense are not just this one. He also said that even if the U.S. now allows the export of H200 to China, Chinese companies may not necessarily buy it. This indicates that the U.S.'s plan to flood the market with an outdated card may not succeed.
This proves that Trump's "relaxation" is far from the end of competition, nor is it any form of "friendliness toward China," but rather marks the entry of Sino-U.S. technological competition into a more complex new phase. Trump's H200 deregulation might bring short-term profits to NVIDIA, but it cannot change the big trend of China's technological self-reliance. The future technological competition will no longer be about who can block whom, but about who can innovate faster. The chessboard of the chip war has changed, and the balance of power has shifted.
Original: toutiao.com/article/7582159738939425318/
Statement: This article represents the views of the author himself.