Hacker News

A couple of years ago Bloomberg reported about spy chips/hw backdoors in SuperMicro mainboards but to my knowledge without a smoking gun proof. Maybe they had to settle outside of court and also had to sign papers to help protect the company from further damage in the future. Using (other) Bloomberg material may have triggered this. Of course this is a wild speculation. I have no evidence or insider knowledge.

Yeah what as the story behind the BBerg take down drama? I just remember it being something absurd.

Supermicro is definitely a "you get what you pay for". We bought thousands of servers from their vertical integrations partners, had massive board and backplane problems. Took a few years but they eventually took back over $30 million dollars worth of servers, which were scrapped ultimately because the rework on them was so cost prohibitive. We lost $30M on that even after the $30M in good will refunds. Supermicro also has the lowest bios/efi/bmc/ipmi/redfish out of any vendor we have seen. Just low tier cheap ass shit by a company who can barely survive quarter to quarter without running some new scam on customers, investors, and even governments.

How do you even find motherboards on AliExpress properly? Do you have a methodology to split the chaff from the wheat?

Ehhh, I think it's more like the CEO and others were Chinese assets for a long time.

Remember the 2018 accusations of spy chips implanted in supermicro motherboards that everyone denied so strongly?

You either become an Apple or you eventually circle the drain competing to zero margins which forces 'other methods' of generating growth.

Yep, same how the sales of German industrial CNC, machines, tools and lathes exploded in Russia's neighbouring former soviet republics after 2022 for some reason.

Man, Kazakhstan must be an industrial powerhouse by now with all that German machinery. Can't wait for Kazakh EVs and semiconductors to hit the market.

Sanctions evasions happen A LOT and enforcement has always been spotty.

MICE is the acronym for categorizing the common motivations for espionage:

M - Money/Greed

I - Ideology/Divided Loyalty

C - Coercion/Compromise

E - Ego

Sometimes, I think we look at people who are this wealthy and think they should be immune to these kinds of shenanigans, but I'd wager that the -ICE becomes even easier to exploit in people once they no longer need money, if they were already susceptible to it to begin with.

Ultra wealthy people are not in it for money. They like the game, and the money is a side effect. Many are willing to cheat evidently too.

Copying CPUs isn't really a thing: they are too complex.

If you could steal all the designs at TSMC, and you had exactly the process that TSMC uses, you could definitely make counterfeits. If you didn't have TSMC's specific process, you could adapt the designs (to Intel or Samsung) with serious but not epic effort. If you couldn't make the processes similar (ie, want to fab on SMIC), you are basically back to RTL, and can look forward to the most expensive and time-consuming part of chip design.

This is nothing like copying a trivial, non-complex item like a car. Copying a modern jet engine is starting to get close (for instance, single-crystal blades), but even they are much simpler. I mention the latter because the largest, most resourced countries in the world have tried and are still trying.

If engines are hard to build, why not build a car 3x the size of a normal one, well you can but due to things like aerodynamics, etc etc you'll never match the speed or fuel economy of cars.

Same with chips, efficiency, speed, etc all depend on good design, and cutting edge factors, if the main reason your chip isn't faster is because of the distance between your L1 cache and your core is far, then having a bigger node process but bigger chip won't make it quicker.

> Can someone shed light on why China still couldn't copy the Nvidia GPUs in some form?

They have alternatives, like the Tian supercomputer was originally built with Xeon Phi chips that have been replaced with their own domestic alternatives.

A big limitation is getting access to fab slots. Nvidia and Apple are very aggressive about buying up capacity from TSMC, etc, and China's own domestic fabs are improving fast but still not a real match, particularly for volume.

They can given enough time.

But there's a distinct time/value of investment equation with the current AI boom. The jury is at best still out on what that equation is for the goals of capital (it's increasingly looking like there's no moat), but if you're a national government trying to encourage local bleeding edge expertise in new fields like this it's quite a bit more clear.

Another factor, it's not just GPUs it's the full hardware stack. https://static.tweaktown.com/news/1/1/110521_2_nvidia-update...

At 3 GHz, a signal can travel at most 10 cm per clock cycle. You can't really physically scale a chip up.

Mostly high end lithography.

They can copy it. And no, the software moat is not there if someone choose the blatant copy route. They just can't build it in the scale they want yet.

> what if they just use 12nm and create GPUs with much bigger size but comparable performance

Physics do not work this way :/

Seems like a good buy now. They're still making and selling hardware.

combination of both, they published papers so we can clearly see they are not just duplicating old methods but coming up with new optimizations. ... yet we can't rule out that they used Nvidia. I don't even see how the export restrictions work, it's stupid. A Chinese company can go to another country, say France or Canada, setup a business buy a bunch of GPUs then make it available to their subsidiary in China. The export restrictions doesn't restrict usage/sharing/renting as far as I know...

The answer is, of course lol?

Gamers Nexus did a whole deep dive which basically proved that Chinese researchers had access to whatever they wanted.

https://youtu.be/1H3xQaf7BFI?si=ojlxOC7uiPqZxv0N

edit: not sure if this was sarcasm

I'm kindof surprised by this take.

Did you think the hesitancy of westerners engaging and relying on Chinese labs was due to vibes? There are fundamental cultural differences at play, wether we are comfortable admitting that or not.

Simon, love your work. Hope this is sarcasm. If not, imagine the opposite: Sam Altman and co suddenly started producing tons of content about how smart they are in Mandarin. Why do they even need a story to begin with, let alone one they push halfway around the world?

The $2.5B number is just these guys. It could be 10x in total.

same!

If you do, you could protect yourself with a sell stop below $17.25... because if it breaks that on weekly candles, next are $14 and $10. Or you could buy some calls instead when the volatility calms down. If you do it now, the volcrush could happen even if you're correct.

Not investment advice, do you own research. I'm just someone on the Internet.

Yes, debunked or at least never backed up any actual evidence.

(Allegedly) just some Bloomberg (alleged) bullshittery, (allegedly) posted to move the market.

Those claims were never confirmed, no? Some of it might be true or trueish but I'm not talking Bloomberg's anonymous sources word for it, and with so much supermicro gear out there you would think some other evidence would show up.

Bloomberg's claims sound like science fiction: https://www.servethehome.com/investigating-implausible-bloom...

Bloomberg's tech coverage is not great from what I've seen. Last year they published a video which was intended to investigate GPUs being smuggled into China, but they couldn't get access to a data center so they basically said we don't know if it's true or not. Meanwhile an independent Youtuber with a fraction of the resources actually met and filmed the smugglers and the middlemen brokering the sales between them and the data centers. Bloomberg responded by filing a DMCA takedown of that video.

Didn't that turn out to be incorrect?

Multiple security companies looked into this and found nothing malicious.

From thousands of miles away you can hear the fans at the NSA data center as they spin up checking the background to all responses to this posting.

> It also doesn't seem like it should be a crime to disagree with your state on who deserves what service...

Seems like that's a pretty obvious and straightforward power for a state to have. The state has to make foreign and domestic policy decisions, and to be effective that would have to include trade restrictions. Otherwise you could have situations like businessmen profiting by selling weapons to the enemy to kill his own countrymen--and there are sociopaths who'd do that.

> i never voted for the dingbats who control who is called a terrorist, let alone the people scared of china.

So what?