Why Can't China Copy Nvidia GPUs to Make Its Own Graphics Cards

Why doesn't China study NVIDIA GPUs, then make its own graphics cards?

Making graphics cards is harder than making planes or tanks.

Oh, come on. It’s just a circuit board, isn’t it?

A circuit board? A top-of-the-line one sells for over 200,000 yuan, more than a car.

Then take one apart and copy it. Copy it? That stamp-sized chip packs 80 billion transistors, 10 times Earth's population.

80 billion? At one per second, you'd count since Confucius's day.

I'll get 10,000 people to copy it. Even 100,000 people can't help. You copy the recipe, and without the right pot, you can't cook.

What pot? Come on, I’ll show you. Uh… what are you doing? Put me down!

This chip factory is 10,000 times cleaner than an OR. Isn't it much?

A speck of dust from you on the line is like a mountain on train tracks.

What’s that round, shiny mirror? The light source. Chips are etched here. Made of?

Sand, purified into silicon with a purity of 99.9999999%.

The wafer is polished to shine, mirror-flat.

Where’s the pot? Right here. What’s that huge metal thing?

A lithography machine. The most advanced kind.

Only one company worldwide makes it. One costs more than a top private jet, and you can’t buy one.

Can't buy one? First, see how amazing it is.

What does it do? Etch silicon wafers. Can't you use a knife?

Hair is 10,000 times thicker than this circuit. What knife could work?

Then what do you use? Light. What light?

Laser tin droplets, flatten them, then blast them apart, firing 50,000 times a second to make EUV light, which can’t even pass through air. H-hit tin droplets?

Even crazier, the mirrors inside are so flat, Scaled up to Germany's size, the highest bump would be under 0.1 mm. Are you kidding me?

And that’s just etching one layer. A chip has to stack dozens of layers, with a layer error under 1/10,000 of a hair's width. What if it's off?

If it's off, the wafer is scrap. Then can’t you fix it? No, there’s no eraser for this. You can only throw it away.

Just throw it out? Hence the term yield, with a new process, few chips per wafer work. You must spend big to fix it.

No wonder it's so pricey. So next comes the graphics card?

Not so fast. You still need packaging, memory, and fans, and at 700 watts, it's a furnace.

Even if you manage to make it all, then it’ll work, right?

The deadliest part is this: You think NVIDIA sells graphics cards, but it sells a whole ecosystem. What ecosystem?

Millions of developers spent nearly 20 years coding for it, No matter how powerful a card you build yourself, the programs still won’t run, Like building a car on someone else's road.

Can’t you do it yourself? One firm designs, one makes the software, one makes the machine, Materials come from suppliers worldwide. No country can provide them all.

So if you can't buy them? You have the blueprints, the workers, the sand, but you can't make it. That's being choked.

You're blocked not by metal, but by that beam of light, a whole chain.

What happens if one link breaks? Plants worth tens of billions, and R&D worth billions, all sit waiting.

So, should we take it apart? Yes. Take apart a plane or a tank, and you can see and touch the parts.

Take apart a graphics card, and all you learn is what it looks like.

Then what do we do? From sand to software, we have to master every link ourselves, There's no shortcut, but lots of people are already working on it.

I used to think it was a circuit board, but now I know that something the size of a postage stamp holds humanity's most advanced industry.

When do you think domestic GPUs will catch up?

Talk in comments.