“Please Do Not Sell B30A Chips to China” by Zvi

The Chinese and Americans are currently negotiating a trade deal. There are plenty of ways to generate a win-win deal, and early signs of this are promising on many fronts.

Since this will be discussed for real tomorrow as per reports, I will offer my thoughts on this one more time.

The biggest mistake America could make would be to effectively give up Taiwan, which would be catastrophic on many levels including that Taiwan contains TSMC. I am assuming we are not so foolish as to seriously consider doing this, still I note it.

Beyond that, the key thing, basically the only thing, America has to do other than ‘get a reasonable deal overall’ is not be so captured or foolish or both as to allow export of the B30A chip, or even worse than that (yes it can always get worse) allow relaxation of restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing imports.

At first I hadn’t heard signs about this. But now it looks like the nightmare of handing China compute parity on a silver platter is very much in play.

I disagreed with the decision to sell the Nvidia H20 chips to China, but that [...]

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Outline:

(02:01) What It Would Mean To Sell The B30A

(07:22) A Note On The 'Tech Stack'

(08:32) A Note On Trade Imbalances

(09:06) What If They Don't Want The Chips?

(10:15) Nvidia Is Going Great Anyway Thank You

(11:20) Oh Yeah That Other Thing

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First published:
October 29th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ijYpLexfhHyhM2HBC/please-do-not-sell-b30a-chips-to-china

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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