NVIDIA really has some pull—OpenAI even backed off on the chip export restrictions to China. Up until last year, OpenAI was a strong advocate for restricting chip exports to China, actively lobbying for it. But by mid-this year, they only called for export controls without specifically naming China anymore. Now, according to Politico, OpenAI has gone completely silent on the matter, not mentioning it at all. The main reason? OpenAI heavily relies on NVIDIA, and NVIDIA’s consistent stance has been, 'We’ve got to sell chips to China, or they’ll just make their own.' Although Huawei’s chips aren’t great for training, they’re still passable for inference tasks. This might also be one of the deeper reasons why domestic companies are so focused on distillation—there just aren’t enough GPUs for training.