The United States of America is known for its values in democracy and individual liberty, expressing these values through economy and society. However, these core principles of the USA are possibly not as emphasized as they used to be because of the control that the government has over private businesses.
One example of this manipulation of power can be seen in the Nvidia selling regulation.
Nvidia is a private company that creates graphics, cards, and software. Despite their greatest profit margin being graphics cards made for gaming, they also are a world-leading industry in Artificial Intelligence hardware and produce graphics cards that are specifically designed for this purpose.
Because of the progression in society and technology, more and more companies are interested in investing in AI technology because of its usefulness, regardless of whether the company is a technology manufacturer or a fast food chain.
Due to the quality and reliability of Nvidia products, they sell hardware internationally and attempt to spread AI technology to all parts of the world with the intention of revolutionizing technology in all aspects of industry. However, the United States government disapproves of this, and specifically made a ban on Nvidia international marketing.
Because the United States and China are competing with each other as world powers, the United States government banned the export of Nvidia AI hardware to China. According to CNBC, one of the processors that was banned for export, the H100, was “the processor of choice for AI firms in the US such as OpenAI.”
With this ban, the United States hopes to prevent China from accessing these resources. However, there are many concerns regarding this ability of the government. The government is apparently capable of regulating the “free market” which was one of the principles of the economy that the United States was built upon.
Restriction of commerce for the aforementioned purpose violates this idea, which raises concern for what the government in a democracy actually can do.
Similar to the congressional decision to ban the popular social media application, TikTok, because of its ties to China, this decision appears to show that despite the government being a democracy, it has a powerful influence on media, technology, and the economy; the government can restrict commerce and even enforce censorship, which puts the democracy and individual liberty at risk of being taken away.
Fortunately for the Chinese, neighboring countries such as Thailand are still allowed to receive graphics cards from Nvidia, which is used as a loophole to ship these cards to China where they can still be used to expand the capabilities of technology and Artificial Intelligence.