Comment by kllrnohj
1 day ago
Or they just don't actually have any compute access restrictions of significance? Chinese companies can just go use those GPUs in neighboring countries that aren't export-restricted, like Malaysia. Like ByteDance openly did: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/chinas-byted...
and Tencent is rumored to have done via Japan: https://wccftech.com/china-tencent-gains-access-to-nvidia-bl...
And that's not even considering just smuggling the GPUs in by eg buying them in Singapore.
AI-specific chips also seem to be on the easier side to design & create relative to high performance CPUs & GPUs, so there's no particular reason to expect Chinese domestic designs to continuously lag behind. They have access to the same fabs, after all
Even ignoring chip export ban, Chinese companies have way less funding than American counterparts, maybe 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less depending on which company you look at. Deepseek’s recent big funding round being “only” a couple billion $ at $50B valuation, for example. Bytedance and Tencent are tech giants for sure, nonetheless they’re not Google kind of giant.
> Bytedance and Tencent are tech giants for sure, nonetheless they’re not Google kind of giant.
$186 billion and $105 billion revenue in 2025 respectively vs. $402 billion? Yes, Google is larger, but they're all in that same ballpark?
ByteDance's 2025 net income isn't that different from Anthropic's Series H funding even ($50bn vs $65bn respectively).
But this is all also ignoring how much of China is state owned (25% of the GDP!), so the available resource pool is dramatically larger than it would appear depending on what the government decides is important
Chinese companies likely aren't paying millions/year for their researchers but a tenth of it.