What the Latest Sanctions Against Chinese Imports Will Accomplish in Practice (Almost Nothing)
They talk of "AI" chips, meaning standard GPUs with some task-optimised accelerators (sans the already-empty [1, 2] buzzwords and hype)
TODAY (hours ago) and a few days ago we deemed sanctions against China - in the hardware sector - a "leading" story. They basically try to prevent China getting some 'US' (probably made in Taiwan) chips irrespective of how hard to enforce such bans will be. They may use terms like "intellectual property" as if a large military needs to care about these mere concepts and politicians offer some "feelgood" to nationalist constituents having signed off some new bill or a list of embargoes. In practice, they attack the very notion of design sharing (Open Hardware or free designs), rendering everybody worse off because China - and Russia for that matter - can find an import route and get its hand on everything. Heck, AMD has just openly admitted overproduction of chips. This article from several hours ago says "AMD appears to have a serious oversupply issue..."
Embargo or no embargo, China will bypass that anyway. Does that mean North Korea and Russia too get access to "the technology" (they just mean patents typically)? Maybe. And either way, if you ban exports/imports, they will make their own copycats (designs) and get some factories to manufacture these.
The politicians propose policies that sometimes sound good. But the genie is out the bottle and the sanctions are mostly a laugh. █