The US has Nvidia, which is the current leader in chips for AI data centers, where number crunching the AI models grows in capability with the chip power. China has rare earth elements. There can be trade, where the Chinese rare earth advantage is not challenged or not as intensively challenged as if China were to embargo its rare earth elements. Nvidia chips, in turn might see less intensive Chinese effort put into competitive chip development if we allow the state-of-art Nvidie chips to be traded. Nvidia has competition not only potentially from China, but from Intel, and AMD. And other potential entrants, worldwide, i.e., in the U.S. and other nations as well as China.
Cutting some past deal had its pluses and minuses. Presume Jensen fucking the spy was known, and kept quiet for negotiation pursposes. Jensen is happy, the rare earth users in the U.S. would be happy, and AliBaba would be happy. And add into it, data center Nvidia chip usage was permitted in other Asian nations, Thailand perhaps, where Chinese firms could rent time on the processing power. Why own it if the rental is priced reasonably?
All that, and awareness that other chips besides data center GPU chips might have as much or more military competitive value, and that adds to an incentive to cut a deal on data center GPU trade, at the governmental as well as the industrial levels, and keeping it quiet might be seen as advantageous, i.e., no leaked knowledge, no questions from the public pinching those generating terms and conditions of some state-to-state deal.
So, why Jensen Huang's dalliance with a spy is now released publicly as "news" when it was know at national intelligence levels since early 2024? Why the timing? What's real now is Anthropic and OpenAI planning IPO effort while Musk's SpaceX already got first tracked. What does that mean, along with popular NIMBY objection to data center siting while Musk took in a money haul and now talks of data centers in space - with no objecting neighbors there. How is that a factor or not?
Then this vidio, raising concern about the deal appears to have been Nvidia getting chip sales to China to boost income, but with a 15% take to the U.S. government coffers. Was there some DARPA advanced tech involved, yes or no? It is all up for grabs in terms of speculating why drag Jensen over the rocks now, but not earlier?
Crabgrass does not pretend to have answers. Questions, and guesses, yes, but answers will have to come from elsewhere. The new Congress will investigate, and one question = was the matter elevated to public news and speculation now, to divert investigative energy from other muckraking tasks? It's a real ball of thread.
A Gordian knot. To be cut through rather than unwound? Time being of the essence now that Jensen's conduct has been injected into the pubic domain? Who is scheduling what, you tell me? And, why now?