“ChinAI #255: Panic buying, speculative booms, and whack-a-mole — what lengths will Chinese companies go to get an NVIDIA A100 chip?” by Jeffrey Ding

Greetings from a world where… policy is policy and businesses is business [政策是政策，生意是生意] …***We’ve hit a bit of a lull in paid subscriptions lately, so please consider subscribing here to support ChinAI under a Guardian/Wikipedia-style tipping model (everyone gets the same content but those who can pay support access for all AND compensation for awesome ChinAI contributors). As always, the searchable archive of all past issues is here. Feature Translation: After the Aug 2022/Oct 2023 controls, how are Chinese companies getting high-end AI chips Context: It's October 20, 2023, and the hottest betting action in Hong Kong (just 60km from the world's top gambling hub in Macau) is on who will get the 300 newly arrived 8-card A100 servers. Total value: 800 million RMB. This is three days after the U.S. extended the scope of export controls on chips to include close substitutes for the NVIDIA A100 (which [...] --- First published: February 26th, 2024 Source: https://chinai.substack.com/p/chinai-255-panic-buying-speculative --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.