After the new chip ban, China's AI researchers have a backup plan: AI accelerators

As the U.S. government scrambles to pull the semiconductor rug out from under China's AI ecosystem, some AI researchers in the country are shrugging it off. "Nvidia will lose a lot of [market share] in their high-end GPU graphic cards, but a lot of the startups in China making those AI acceleration cards will get orders," according to an AI researcher and professor at a prestigious scientific university in Beijing who I spoke with via video chat this week. In China, where AI engineers and other developers are accustomed to technical workarounds to circumvent censors and other blockades, there may be some wiggle room to counteract U.S. export controls by building AI accelerator cards intended for more specific tasks, the researcher said. Nvidia's strengths have been in "very general-purpose GPUs that can handle [many] types of computations, like for gaming and computing." But building accelerators is not so difficult, the researcher said. "Just making accelerating cards is a lot easier because you just need to handle very few specific types of computations.