US Export Restrictions Are Handing Global AI to Huawei | Steven Glinert

Steven Glinert (0:00)

But you gotta buy our chips, you gotta buy our, you gotta use Amazon, you gotta build, you know, your cloud in the way that we wish. You have to, you know, we were gonna impose governance over the way you build out your AI, your AI infrastructure. And then we give you access to the models right away, right? We're in a brave new world where the United States and China are competing in a way over the production of intelligence, and this is the new front of the Cold War, and I think we should, we should leverage, we should try to bring people into our alliance system in our AI system.

SPEAKER_2 (0:36)

All right, we are back. We're live with Steven Glinert, who is the founder and CEO of Sphere Semi.

Steven Glinert (0:43)

You know, that's not how you pronounce my name.

SPEAKER_2 (0:45)

Glynert?

Steven Glinert (0:45)

Glynert.

SPEAKER_2 (0:46)

Glynert. Okay.

Steven Glinert (0:47)

Not a lot of people know that.

SPEAKER_2 (0:48)

Well, now I know that.

Steven Glinert (0:49)

I know.

SPEAKER_2 (0:50)

Yeah. Is this your first time in the studio?

Steven Glinert (0:51)

It is. I'm very excited.

SPEAKER_2 (0:53)

Wow. This is literally, what, your ninth time on MTS or something? Yeah.

Steven Glinert (0:56)

And it just was, you know, I don't know. I was going to make a joke.

I wasn't good enough to be invited to the studio until just now.

SPEAKER_2 (1:05)

Well, you're good enough now on the hottest day of the year. You know, it's like 80 degrees in this room right now.

Steven Glinert (1:09)

Boiling.

SPEAKER_2 (1:09)

It's like Singapore, where you're coming from.

Steven Glinert (1:12)

Yeah. Sometimes am.

SPEAKER_2 (1:14)

Well, well, speaking of Southeast Asia segue, you just told me that Malaysia is now going to be populating their national data centers with Huawei chips instead of Nvidia.

Steven Glinert (1:24)

So one of the biggest news stories that I've been following, I think it's the there's a lot of news this week, so it's hard to keep track of everything. But one of the big news stories that I've been following is the slow but sure breakdown of what I think of as the Nvidia global monopolistic position in terms of both inference and obviously training. I think they're still in a pretty strong position from a training perspective, but I think from an inference perspective, we're starting to see some real like dents that are pretty significant. So I think dent number one obviously is things like jalapeno, things like tranium, things like all the new companies that are coming out from etched to some of the more interesting and amazing analog solutions like Xtropic. So those are putting a real dent in the Nvidia position domestically. But the other thing that's happening is that the Huawei AI or rather the Huawei stack is now I think strong enough to really actually threaten Nvidia's position from a global level. So Huawei, they don't have EUV.

Most of their chips are 5 nanometers. The Ascend are 5 nanometers. But at the same time, they're significantly cheaper.

And through a combination of just really good engineering around optical interconnects, and just engineering on the rack level, they've been able to build something that's an incredibly competitive product with Nvidia. If you're like Malaysia, probably Egypt, and I would say increasingly you'll see this outside of core Western allies, you're going to probably be tempted to choose Huawei over Nvidia for your national data centers, for a lot of your national projects. Why?

I think the other thing that's interesting is that Nvidia locks you into a lot of stuff, right? Nvidia locks you into a lot of different, for example, Envy Link will lock you in, so you have to buy this retimer and you have to buy this switch, and you have to buy all these other things. You don't get flexibility, you don't get configurability, you get locked into what is seen as a very, I would say, hegemonic US position that might be frightening to countries. So I think that that's why. It's just a good chip, it's a good stack. Huawei offers lots of interesting things to people who buy it, you can optimize it for the Chinese open source models, which are favored in ROW, right? We have a real fear of them in the United States. I think a lot of that is justified. I was called a China dove recently, so I feel like I have to keep my China hot cred. But some of the open source fear from Chinese models is justified, some is less justified. Obviously there's sort of an argument that I don't want to go into there, but it's great for the Chinese models, it's cheap, it's flexible, there's a lot of other things that they offer. I bet there's certain types of monitoring capabilities that they probably throw in that might be favorable to governments like Malaysia or Egypt or others.