I have no idea whether this is legit or not (there's no link to any code), I'm mentioning this because all the comments here are assuming truth without verifying the contents.
The supposed “China Hawk” you mention, on google searching, seems to be David Perdue.
Is there a chance you are confusing similar yet different last names as the same person?
Black & grey market devices marked up many times cost buyers heavily, while still suppressing motivation to develop sovereignty.
If nvidia selling to China tolerated for the realpolitik and gets undone by incoming powers to create an appearance of change, is it really the right thing to do? Is it the smart thing to do?
It's an interesting thought experiment, though, we will probably never know.
Given the track record of this administration, they were probably paid to tolerate said exports.
What's the chance that these GPUs got to China without Trump getting a cut somehow?
Pretty much zero. Trump sat on knowledge of the affair for an entire year. That's extremely guilty behavior, he was either extorting Huang or covering g for him.
The whole thing is the most corrupt thing we have ever seen at the presidential level.
Bigger than Watergate by far
The 2nd option is perfectly legal and allowed by US government.
As Hezbollah discovered in 2024, covert supply-chain interdiction is very possible and I'd be surprised if the CIA didn't know what was going on, at least to some extent.
And these were completely openly disclosed as headline properties of the software: https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepInfer/tree/main/#performa...
No one found it remarkable a couple weeks ago, ... but now the fact that DS is using blackwell is apparently some super secret requiring clever RNG init stats???
I get that the geopolitical angle is sensitive, especially with the backdrop of today's big news - but I thought this was a really well-researched technical deep dive, right up HN's alley. (TIL: you could fingerprint gpu hardware just from an llm weights!)