zlacker

>>giulio+(OP)
I'm surprised the perspective of China making TPUs at scale in a couple of years is not bigger news. It could be a deadly blow for Google, NVIDIA, and the rest. Combine it with China's nuclear base and labor pool. And the cherry on top, America will train 600k Chinese students as Trump agreed to.

The TPUv4 and TPUv6 docs were stolen by a Chinese national in 2022/2023: https://www.cyberhaven.com/blog/lessons-learned-from-the-goo... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/superseding-indictment-charge...

And that's just 1 guy that got caught. Who knows how many other cases were there.

A Chinese startup is already making clusters of TPUs and has revenue https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3334244/ai-start-...

>>alecco+zi
Manufacturing is the hard part. China certainly has the knowledge to build a TPU architecture without needing to steal the plans. What they don't have is the ability to actually build the chips. This is even in spite of also stealing lithography plans.

There is a dark art to semiconductor manufacturing that pretty much only TSMC really has the wizards for. Maybe intel and samsung a bit too.

>>Workac+aj
Lot of retired fab folks in the Austin area if you needed to spin up a local fab. It's really not a dark art, there are plenty of folks that have experience in the industry.

>>tomrod+Il
This is sort of like saying there are lots of kids in the local community college shop class if you want to spin up an F1 team.

The knowledge of making 2008 era chips is not a gating factor for getting a handful of atoms to function as a transistor in current SOTA chips. There are probably 100 people on earth who know how to do this, and the majority of them are in Taiwan.

Again, China has literally stolen the plans for EUV lithography, years ago, and still cannot get it to work. Even Samsung and Intel, using the same machines as TSMC, cannot match what they are doing.

It's a dark art in the most literal sense.

Nevermind that new these cutting edge fabs cost ~$50 Billion each.