Does Trump’s Nvidia chip flip reveal anxieties on both sides of China-US tech war?
Can Washington bind Chinese rivals to American technologies or will access to the AI chips hasten Beijing’s challenge to US dominance?
Rather than seeing it as an olive branch, many Chinese commenters interpreted the move as a sophisticated Trojan horse-style trap that aimed to make Beijing dependent on American technologies in advanced semiconductors and other chokepoint sectors.
Meanwhile, several US lawmakers and former White House advisers labelled the scrapping of the embargo a disastrous break from bipartisan efforts to prevent China from challenging American technological dominance.
The range of views across the Pacific has laid bare the anxieties on both sides over the trajectory of the China-US tech war and what bearing the AI race will have on the two powers’ global standing.
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China creates analogue AI chip said to be 1,000 times faster than Nvidia GPU
But experts said that allowing the leading US chip designer to sell its second-best AI accelerators to vetted customers in China was unlikely to make a fundamental difference to the technological competition.