> This is a national security issue for the USA

I'm skeptical. If it was actually a national security issue those GPUs would not be allowed to be sold to civilians. You can't have something that is easily portable and readily available to and tradable between civilians in the US and realistically expect it not to get out.

> If it was actually a national security issue those GPUs would not be allowed to be sold to civilians.

Fertilizer can be made into bombs yet it's still sold to civilians. I would argue that purchasing a Beirut amount of it and transporting it through a city would be of interest to national security.

Likewise, there's a difference between a GPU and over 1000+ AI servers

It's not that a single GPU is a national security issue (although the law treats it like such).

It's that selling MILLIONS of GPUs is a national security issue.

Enforcing the first is a fool's errand, but the second one is much more doable.

Even if they can limit exports to only a handful of GPUs is that sufficient?

My understanding is that what those countries want them for is AI training. Once a model is trained using the model can be done on much less powerful hardware.

So instead of trying to set up sham companies that they indirectly control to buy and sneak GPUs out of the county, how about setting up a sham startup in the US that they indirectly control in some field that needs AI, have it buy a ton of GPUs, and then have it use some of those resources to run training jobs for them?

Is it even possible for civilians to buy enough data center nvidia gpus to train an LLM? I thought getting just one was pretty hard

tru but at least they can stifle it and make it very expensive by shutting down as many channels as possible. The law, even when it's as stupid as banning encryption algorithm exports in the 90's, must be obeyed, but I think ultimately this is useless, China will make their own eventually, this is an uphill battle.