緊急配信：ジェンスン退任、MATCH法は動くのか？

All right. Hey, Dylan. Hey, Jordan. Thanks for joining. Did you guys hear the CEO of the world's largest and most important company just resigned? No. Are you serious? Are you serious? What could possibly have led to that? I mean, there's some allegations, some pretty serious conduct violations here. It was apparently you can't sleep with your subordinates and keep your job. Yeah. Wait, Jordan. I mean, we've got Elon. We've got Sergey. Everyone in Silicon. Once you get to a trillion dollars, I think you're like legislated to start sleeping with your support nets. There must be something else. I think the trillion dollar class might be fine. But once you get to five trillion, then you have problems with this sort of stuff. Then, well, 2.0 really starts coming after you. Oh, my God. 3.0. Yeah, we're rotating back. so yeah this is truly

a you know momentous day momentous moment for the future of America China and artificial intelligence where Dylan somehow looks bored after all of this or just drained I don't know how are you processing it dude I mean I don't know like you're like look up to some guy this guy and then like you know he does these things it's not fun you know it's um look there's a lot of things going on and a lot of things to contemplate. I think given we're China talk, we shouldn't even talk about the future of NVIDIA. We should just talk about the future of open source and future of AI and China-US relations. I think like, you know, I've obviously been a hawk or a fucking bald eagle, as we said in a prior podcast, for quite some time. and um but at the same time there's like i'm worried this is going to be used as cover to pass really stupid laws um and you know obviously you know in nvidia without jensen is a much

weaker company now whether you think nvidia's interests are that of the national interest of america is something that i think like most people say yes but i think some people in the audience would probably say no. I mean, it's pretty clear NVIDIA's chips were ending up in China. Knowingly or not, it's probably just knowingly. But yeah, I mean, I think, look, Jensen and NVIDIA were the biggest defenders against not shipping chips to China, and now they are gone and out of play. So what regulations pass? You know, I hope this means the Match Act passes, right? That is far more important for U.S. national interest than the RASA Act, RASA. RASA is a pretty dumb bill. Hi, everyone. China Talk editor Lilly here with some context. Remote Access Security Act, or RASA, would amend export control to clarify that remote access to U.S.-controlled chips counts as an export. This makes cloud rental subject to the same rules as shipping the chip itself.

RASA passed the House 269 votes to 22 in January of this year, but no Senate vote has been held or scheduled. A parallel Senate version is stuck in the banking committee, and no version of the current NDAA text includes RASA. The Senate version of RASA directly targets, quote, foreign persons of concern, generally interpreted as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and companies whose ultimate parent is headquartered in one of those countries, as well as entity-list firms. As designed, RASA would cover only single-customer clusters that are big enough to provide frontier training. This threshold is commerce's set following consultation with chipmakers, AI labs, and cloud providers. RASA would not cover inference rentals, smaller allocations, API access, smuggled chips, or chips already in China. Perhaps most importantly, RASA does not ban anything itself. The text in the Senate says, quote, may, and the House text acts only if the Secretary, quote, determines a serious risk. There is no deadline nor minimum in place here. Likewise, commerce can choose whether to wind down existing leases or run them to term.

These flexibilities should be viewed as a feature and not a bug. The bill settles the legal authority, adds material penalties, and sets up the entire system to survive a change of administration. Rasa then gives commerce the tools to titrate access to rented chips as it deems appropriate. I think, like, you know, Biden-style diffusion controls should totally be done. But I think, like, again, like, if the U.S. government goes and passes RASA, That's going to be a big issue. It's going to be really bad for American interest, probably, in the long term and short term, medium term. So, yeah, I think this is the key aspects of it, right? And the other undertoning is, like, you can't just ban everything because China can and will utilize the fact that their components are in every single NVIDIA server and every single Google server and every single Amazon server, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You cannot get materials, you know, you cannot build these things without them. So there is a level of tit for tat here. Yeah, I don't know. I think that's my main take.

You can edit. Well, I think it's a crossover one, right? So we should talk about the future of AI a little bit, too. But we open with Match and Rasa. Let's start with Match and Rasa. So Match Act, for those who have not been tuning in to my Match Act shilling over the past few months, is this idea that basically advanced EUV lithography alongside EUV, which already hasn't been able to get into China, shouldn't be able to go into China. Allegedly shouldn't be able to go into China. Rasa is slightly different. It is aiming to close the, quote, cloud access loophole by which Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance today currently can legally access GPUs which are banned from being imported into China by setting up these cutouts in Malaysia, which you guys have done such a great job of sort of untangling. Jordan, do you share Dylan's skepticism about Rasa and its potential fallout?

Or maybe, Dylan, why don't you expand on why you think it's such a bad thing? I think, you know, what is the U.S. national interest? is it is to A, maintain a lead on AI as large as possible, and B, control China's access to AI as much as possible. If your goal is to maintain a lead as large as possible for as long as possible and maintain control over China, you do not prevent China from having any compute because that actually means that the U.S. will have no compute too. If you full-sell ban anything in my world, I believe that China will just also start enacting economic war. I don't know if you remember, in 2022, I stayed up all night and I wrote the October 7th chip restrictions regulation. And I said, China and USA are officially an economic war. I said, it's a new Cold War. It's an economic war. And in there, I found like 20 loopholes that I posted about that very night. And I'm just one dude, not an army of lawyers.

And was hoping they'd get patched. Many did not get patched and still are not patched. But, like, one of the key aspects of this original restriction, which I think is, you know, mostly true, which is there's the civil-military fusion within China. The Chinese military and state will and can apprehend any resource for military and intelligence purposes, even if it's a completely commercial thing, right? We've seen it with things like Douyin and TikTok already, and that's the most consumer you can get. So, clearly, they do utilize it. At the same time, they will also enact and respond in certain ways. We've seen this with the trade wars. We've seen this with some of the stuff on the auto tariffs. We've seen our auto, you know, almost shutting down American auto plants, things like this, threatening rare earth minerals and things like that. There's been a lot of actions that China has threatened or done some and then pulled back to show their thanks. and so if you ban chips completely from China including rental and deployment there is no

reason for China to not just blow the whole thing up right you have to have some tip for tat now the optimum thing for American policy is what is the minimum amount of compute that China can have with the most amount of American oversight to where they will not blow up the supply chain because we do not have the stomach to disentangle the supply chain. Very clearly, we just don't over and over and over again. And so given that, you cannot have China have no chips, period, both internally and foreign. That will blow this all up. But to minimize the amount of compute and maximize the control, you can have Biden-style diffusion laws where it's certain companies, and yes, it's basically a bill written for hyperscalers, hyperscalers, but hyperscalers can rent to Chinese companies and companies with American sort of, where America has like power over to be like, hey, turn it off at any moment. You want all of their compute to be like that. And if you allow Alibaba or Oracle or ByteDance or whoever it is,

Moonshot, to rent compute from American companies outside of China, and that is their main access of compute, this is supremely awesome because China will not want to send their data externally in many cases. And if they do, we're probably stuff that the U.S. intelligence apparatus can handle. And two, if shit goes tits up, you can turn it all off. Whereas if you turn off remote security access, then there's even more incentive to A, smuggle, B, you know, ramp your own domestic industry. They're going to do that anyways, by the way, which is why you need the match hack. but C, you sort of really prevent any reason for them to continue the status quo, right? Which is a lot of Chinese industry is dedicated to making American compute, at least in the electronic space, for American companies. The largest PCB supplier to NVIDIA is a Chinese company, for example. And it's not just NVIDIA, of course. So I think you have to come in it with a game theory perspective.

And the best thing for America to do is allow remote access of GPUs because the alternatives are much worse. Yeah, I mean, a few pushbacks on that. I think there is a piece of the Chinese ecosystem, you know, Xi Jinping likely included, that is deeply embarrassed by the fact that these companies really, really want to import the GPUs. Part of what we learned over the course of the Trump administration so far is even when Trump is offering them, the Chinese government is like, I'm not entirely sure we even want these companies to buy it. So, yes, we have some equilibrium right now, but I definitely see a world in which, you know, chunks of the Chinese government see something like Rasa and say, all right, great. You know, these companies, they thought they could, you know, get cute and not really invest in the domestic ecosystem. And now they're going to really have to play ball. I think there are also other kind of things that are going on with Xi that would make him less likely to want to declare economic warfare on the U.S. by doing something as dramatic as, you know, shutting off all global manufacturing of chip production, even if it, you know, ends up, we end up figuring out how to do PCP.

Yeah, but we already shut them off. Why wouldn't they retaliate? Because then you get into a tit-for-tat, and by the way, this economy isn't growing and unemployment's at 20%. Every single time we've gotten into that tit-for-tat, there led to a compromise and there was no tit-for-tat, right? Tariffs got reduced. There were some restrictions that went up, but mostly China didn't just take it. They did retaliate, and the U.S. economy and administration would not be willing to stomach the pain. Yeah, I mean, they didn't in 2022. They didn't in... Well, 2022, the rule has had so many loopholes. Yeah, they didn't. OK, they didn't in 2023. They didn't in 2024. And then I think, like, look, Trump, like, kept doing the war in Iran, even though he lost him 10 Senate seats. Like, I think there I think there is a aspect of pain, especially in a sort of second term lame duck when, you know, all the cabinet is leaking against Lutnik because they're pissed. And they've already you know, there's an Axios report that said that, like, China is already breaking the trade deal and they're already doing economic warfare against the US.

I don't think that escalatory dominance is necessarily something that should be completely assumed on the part of the Chinese government. The other argument I would make is that in Rasa, if China has access to compute outside of China, they are now paying humongous margin dollars to the U.S. ecosystem, right? If you take a megawatt of compute outside of China there multiple layers of margin stacking First of all NVIDIA is making you know million of profit per megawatt that gets deployed In addition, the cloud provider is making another $7 to $10 million of profit if it's selling at today's pricing. There is a tremendous amount of profit that we get to get, which companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, et cetera, do either less, they don't have the cloud or they're flowing their own chips. Margins, the cost structure is so different.

Why does China win? They have economies of scale and their cost structure is better. Why does American AI win? Our cost structure is better and our economies of scale is higher. And so allowing them to ship all this money out, right? if ByteDance wants to compete with Meta in the global market on video recommendation algorithms, Meta has a fourth of the cost of compute potentially. If you don't let ByteDance directly buy the chips, but you do let them rent them. Yeah. Well, but I mean, here's the thing. This is like, this kind of, you know, we want to do ByteDance and Meta. Like Zuck was totally fine letting TikTok spend billions of dollars on Instagram ads. Right. But if you just don't let them play the game, then you kind of win by default. And also Dylan, I mean, isn't there an enormous sort of, even in our, you know, shaky AI times over the past week, an enormous demand? Like, do you really think it wouldn't be sort of better for the U.S. to be able to get ahead by having, you know, however many gigawatts are currently flowing, you know, through Malaysia into the Chinese ecosystem

by just like helping open AI Anthropic and DeepMind make better models and make more money? I think that there's also a reflexive nature of this, right? I'm just going to devil's advocate this shit for a while because I think we're generally pretty close, but it's fun to do the devil's advocate just so people hear. And this is sort of what Jensen's argument was to some extent, was, hey, you know what? AI diffusion across the U.S. is largely aided by Chinese models, right? If we look at total ARR of the AI ecosystem, if you add up all the application layer companies that are running on open models, it's actually well worth of $10 billion, right? it's not like it's some like tiny little amount of open model revenue that is going to American companies. And DeepSeek makes a DeepSeek for Flash and the revenue is less than fucking base 10 and fireworks and all these guys serving the Chinese model. Actually, America is making so much money off of the Chinese models. And it's like amazing. And it lets us accrue and invest

more and more and more. You know, yes, ByteDance bought a bunch of ads on TikTok and Zuck didn't really see the threat immediately. Yes, of course, everyone's short-sighted. Everyone makes mistakes, right? You know, Jensen got a little horny, right? That's his short-sighted mistake at the end of the day. But it's... He did more than that, right? I mean, it's clear that what he did... He had many relationships over a long period of time, yes. Again, it's not just the women. It's doing a little more than turning a blind eye to the fact that his suppliers were not only doing the Malaysia thing, which, again, is kind of legal even today, but bringing the chips into China. I don't think it's kind of legal. Yeah, no, no. I mean, this is like ethical hoops. It's like unethical hoops. I think it's about the letter of the law versus the spirit of the law. Like, Jensen is in these closed-door meetings with a lot of the leaders of the U.S. who clearly have the spirit of wanting to slow down China's advance, and he has decisions that he can make,

and they did not necessarily... I don't think that's why he's losing his job. I think he lost his job because there is some evidence that he had, you know, that they knew the chips were going into China. 1000% that they knew in the affair. Yeah, and look, man, I mean, circumstantially around Jensen, his Taiwan sales manager is indicted for smuggling chips out of Taiwan. his closest OEM partner, Supermicro, had their COO and co-founder, or, you know, head of sales, whatever, Wally, arrested. One of their sales managers is currently a fugitive in Taiwan. So it's not necessarily, like, out of the blue that they are cracking down on this and that people around him are being caught with clear evidence, right? Like, the picture of... the Supermicro Taiwan guy with the hairdryer in his hand moving the stickers from the fake servers onto the real ones,

or from the real ones onto the fake servers to mass an audit in September of last year. It's pretty damning evidence that they're aware of this. And there was no honeypot required to get Jensen to do that with Supermicro. Well, I think the evidence that's required that needs to pass the test would be Jensen actually knowing about this and Jensen being complicit in it and doing anything. But either way... If I had to guess, I bet the board has some evidence here. if I had to guess, the board has evidence on this. I mean, like, how do you explain no longer reporting Singapore revenue? Yeah. Like, the circumstantial evidence is there, and when, I think this is the big thing, is, like, people, even in the case of these affairs, they would point and say, well, it's not technically illegal, except the spirit of his actions is against the interests of other people who have a different opinion about the relationship that the U.S. should have with China and the technology that they're working there. And a convenient time right around the midterms is when he gets whacked.

I mean, the cover is gone, right? It was basically like the cabinet members took the blue wave and said, okay, it's fine, we can now blow the cover and it's over for Lutnik and Jensen. Yeah, basically. I mean, it's pretty clear Lutnik always, and Trump wanted to make deals, and they used export restrictions as a deal-making thing. But in another sense, it's the fucking law. You can't negotiate with the law. You make a law, you make a law, and you enforce it. And so there's clearly issues there. No, I think enforcement has been a big question so far. If you look at the Biden era diffusion framework, it was passed and then just not enforced. It's still on the books. Trump just directed people not to enforce that framework. Really? The diffusion laws aren't? They didn't remove them? It was super weird. He had a comment and there was a thing and a footnote, but they never repealed. In 2025, they... Wait, sorry. These are laws in effect? I didn't realize the diffusion... I thought we would have to repass them.

It's not really a law in the traditional sense. It's like a... Executive action. No, no. It's like guidance to the BIS, basically. Yeah. And then he never published a real... Kessler never... Kessler, he's just... I don't know what the fuck he's been doing. Apparently, he shows up in the office. But he never passed a real piece of guidance saying, we are no longer doing this. He just made a footnote somewhere, which is like, by the way, guys, don't worry about this. We're going to bring a new thing for you soon. And that was in May of 2025. So the level of indecision and incompetence that we've seen and just cognitive dissonance on the part of this policy process is really breathtaking. But anyways, I want to come to Jordan. Jordan, what's your RASTA take? Where do you want to put the temperature on just how many chips we should let China have access to remotely? Well, yeah, I think what Dylan said about having the U.S. be able to monitor what China is doing with the chips, as well as being able to have the option to cut off their access and then start to use the chips for what they want in a future

where the intelligence wars are playing out and there's an escalation, I think is important, optionality for them. I think the other thing is that it's so clear how much American companies mutually benefit from a relationship with China, with Chinese companies, with Chinese researchers, with Chinese software, and just with Chinese people. So there's lots of Chinese citizens that work for the frontier left, people who are born in mainland China. And it's really complicated for me to understand. And, like, we work with engineers who are based in China sometimes, that work for NVIDIA, that work for AMD, that have access to early products, that bring up the new GPUs, that work on the software, low-level hardware, stuff like this. And as you escalate tensions, all of this relationship breaks down and everything just started for everybody. So insofar as you are, as anybody is pro-AI,

this is a bad day for AI progress. as a test. I mean, it seems like a bad day for AI progress. That would be my high-level take. The one thing about Rasa that makes it clear to me is, like you said, China is trying to get off GPUs. So, like, in our tracking in February, GLM was released with support for seven domestic accelerators, not just Huawei, but they included more threads, Higon, Canbercon, Colunxon, MetaX, Endflame, DeepSeek published a mega kernel with Huawei Ascend for their V4 model. Meituan claims they trained long cat entirely on Ascend. Like, people don't even train on AMD. You know, it's like only NVIDIA or TPU that you can train on in the U.S. So that's happening, like, with or without the remote access laws being passed. It's just more about motivation. I think it's a lot about inference as well. Are you going to let ByteDance compete globally with inference capacity from these providers on NVIDIA GPUs, or are you just going to not let them into the U.S. and not let them have a business in Southeast Asia or anything like that, or make them serve it from within China?

That's an open question. But maybe the final thing is just like there are so many ways in which me personally and many people I know who work at the American Labs just like to learn from people in time. And if you cut off those direct working relationships, I think it's a one-way street. I think it's really hard to understand how you just roll this stuff back. But then to Dylan's point, I'd love to get your take on this. I think you can do all of the meaningful restrictions just focused on ASML and the Match Act. Expand beyond EUV, stop them getting access to EUV tools too. They need a bunch if they're going to produce any of these chips that go into these centers and make them build lithography from scratch. That's kind of the easiest way to stop them making any progress here. The main thing I think that people just don't understand is that they think if you remove one item at the top of the supply chain, they won't do everything.

And I've used this analogy a hundred times, but it's the jigsaw puzzle, right? You remove one piece, they'll fucking enter near the one piece. If you blow up the board, it's harder. At the end of the day, this is an economic war. If you think you can get away with something without huge ramifications across supply chains, you're not going to be able to solve the issue. You have to just flip the table if you want it to happen. the best way to flip the table is to prevent them from buying relatively low value or low total market cap value goods and make them buy the expensive stuff. Don't buy ASML equipment and make chips and make models. Make them not allowed to buy the ASML equipment. Don't let them buy chips. Make them rent the chips. Don't let them rent the chips. Make them buy the AI, right? You know, make them transfer up the value chain where the value chain is much larger and larger and larger. And if you do that, then China has an economic disadvantage massively so, and this is a scale game. And therefore, the West will win. And so I think that's the key reason why, you know, look, they're going to be pissed about whatever you ban.

Ban the thing at the bottom of the totem pole and chop the legs out underneath them. Don't just attack only the top sphere, the AI aspect, the chips. Focus on how you make the chips. Focus on the equipment to make the chips. That's what's more important. I think it's also a tough thing. Like we're kind of watching China on the rise. And I think that in response to a lot of these actions, they don't want to escalate because the longer that they wait in these intelligence wars, the more time they have to catch up. And there's a lot of discourse about is the gap wider or smaller. I would say the gap in the model capabilities is wider at this point, but the gap in chip capabilities is like as close as it's ever been. But the question is not just like capability, it's also scale, right? And that's where it comes back to the equipment. Like, yes, it sucks, or it's not ideal that, you know, China has been able to break through the sort of 14 nanometer line,

which we like kind of sort of tried to draw on the sand in 2022. But you know this again it a scale game right It not just that you can make 1 chips You need to make 100 You hundred thousand You need to have megawatts upon megawatts of advanced hardware in order to be able to both train and deliver this AI such that it makes a difference to your economy. And, you know, as long as you're getting the equipment side right, it just makes it so much harder for the Chinese ecosystem to compete with the American ones if they can't sort of rely on the Japanese and the Dutch. And by the way, it's like they already can't buy the stuff from the Americans. So it's not like screwing over U.S. companies on the SME side. It's making sure that the Japanese and Dutch and Koreans can't, like, you know, make up for the fact that we're not able to sell them to them. I hear you, Jordan, on the interpersonal stuff. Like, there is an aspect of this which is deeply tragic.

Like, AI has the potential to deliver, like, incredible things for humanity. And, you know, there's a side of this, which is like a kind of beautiful, you know, humanity scale experiment to make the future now. But, you know, the problem is, like, U.S. and China have a lot of issues with each other. And China happens to be run by a authoritarian leader who runs a Leninist system. And it's like, you know, not necessarily it's Yang Wenfeng's fault that that is the case. I mean, it absolutely isn't. Like, there's old blog posts of him talking about how he's not into this. And you can kind of read in his writing, like, a vision of the world, which is much more kind of unified and holistic than what you see out of Xi Jinping and his speeches. And, you know, his frame of the world is this, you know, struggle for commanding heights. But, like, you know, Yangon Feng doesn't run the country, right? Xi does. And he's been doing it for 15 years, and he's going to be around for a long time to come. And that's the reality that people need to operate under.

And Jensen clearly didn't. Like he did not buy in to this framework. He didn't think that sort of China advancing at the same at the same clip as the U.S. was something which was a problem. And there is enough of a consensus among America's elected officials that that's wrong, that we've come to a place that we're at now. Dylan, any any closing policy thoughts? I do want your guys' take on just how bad this is that Jensen's now off the table for the future of American innovation. And we should talk about open models. I mean, he was a big champion, right? Dylan, you were talking earlier. I still don't understand quite why someone didn't spend a few billion dollars and make something better than Kimmy or DeepSea can open source it. I guess that was supposed to be not that easy. It's not money. It's talent, man. Like, you know, like all of the most talented people primarily work at major Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, TBD, right?

And then, you know, those who don't are split across a hundred different startups. There's no startup. I mean, like, yes, Thinking Machines has a crack team, but is Thinking Machines as good as Moonshot? Like, no, like, Moonshot skill-wise is probably just as good as the U.S. labs. They just have a big deficit in computing deployment. And, you know, so I think if we don't have a scale advantage, then you don't win. And these, you know, yes, you know, these smaller labs have spent a lot of money on models. But DeepMind, Grok, Meta have regularly fallen behind at the frontier of Chinese labs, and they're spending more. So it's not just, oh, spend a few billion dollars and you can make a model that's better. The innovation and the quality of the engineering and researchers in the Chinese labs is just very fun. Wait a second. By the way, NVIDIA did spend this money and try to do it and still not produce anything with Nemotron that was better than the open source models from the Chinese lab. So even though he's a big supporter of open source, it's not like you're guaranteed to be effective just because you pour money and time into it.

Kind of hard. Definitely hard. You need compute. You need people. and you need data. So we just got to get Alex Wong on the case. That's the only zero to one we've had, which has been successful in the past three years. I mean, they hired a ton of great researchers and have a ton of compute for sure and spent a bunch of money on high-quality data. It's part of it. I don't know. Look, I think there's two things that I see the discourse shifting towards, which I'm not completely against, but just trying to be more nuanced. one is like ramping up export controls in the form of Rasa and match and the diffusion framework is like an obvious good thing and the U.S. should be immediately doing it like I'm not sure people are thinking through all the implications which is what we tried to discuss here and then the second thing is people are like immediately oh Jensen leaves NVIDIA and it's like guaranteed the company's going to zero and and we can never run without them and it's such a unique work structure. And this is all true, but I think that in that case as well, the more nuanced

take is like in the short term, NVIDIA is fine. Like they need to deliver on commitments to customers and build a bunch of GPUs with the supply chain that they've got. And like nobody set them up for success as well as Jensen could, but now they just need to execute on the stuff he set up them for, for like Rubin and Rubin Ultra. And I think a lot of people know what to go do. I think they know their marching orders. They know their responsibility. They know the mission. And I think the really big test for NVIDIA is like Jensen has been incredibly good at retaining talent, especially amongst his executive team. There are very few high profile departures from the NVIDIA executive team. A lot of people retire and basically only Rene Haas has gone to ARM and like gone on to be a CEO anywhere else. Like there's no EVPs, SVPs, VPs that like really leave that often from NVIDIA. This is a time where, you know, Jensen and the mission isn't at the helm. Somebody needs to continue to give them compensation and direction and keep them and retain them.

And this is probably when the sharks are in the water. The VCs are going to come in and offer people billions of dollars to start their own ship companies, their own neolabs. Hey, come join us over here. I mean, we're going to see in the medium to long term whether NVIDIA can operate with Jensen. I think that question is up in the air because if a year from now we've seen like a bunch of departures from NVIDIA, I'm going to be really concerned about their future. If a year from now, everybody's still like rowing in the same direction and Colette is driving things or they've got somebody else, like especially a technical leader who has emerged like in Buckstaff or something. Maybe they transition Michael Kagan out of CTO or something. I don't know, whatever that looks like. then I would be coming back and saying, hey, I'm much more confident in NVIDIA. But I really think people are underestimating the dominance they have in the supply chain, in the sales and support that they have, all the relationships with the neoclots, all the investments they have in the labs and all the startups, the ability they can use their balance sheet

to backstop everybody and make them be partners with them. They can invest in everybody. They can acquire all these companies as soon as they're successful. well, like it's still NVIDIA's to lose. And I think there's a very, very high chance that they're still doing just fine two, three, four years from now. And another open question is like, okay, say like they, you know, some people get poached, they raise big rounds and they start doing new things. Is that really like the worst thing? Are we sure that's like the worst thing for the Western ecosystem to have, you know, different people trying new bets? The other question is, is like we're going from a founder to someone who is not the founder. And I imagine there are just like, aside from executing on the roadmap, there must be some like, you know, big, wacky, out of consensus things, which Jensen probably would have done over the next five or 10 years, which maybe wouldn't have paid out for another five or 10 years, which I guess potentially wouldn't have happened. And, you know, to what extent does that,

you know, happen, but like half as much? To what extent is that just like, okay, instead of it happening within NVIDIA, it happens from some EVPs new startup. That's kind of the question that I have going from the jobs to the Tim Cook era of NVIDIA. I'm certainly not sitting here saying this is a really good day for NVIDIA. I don't understand why NVIDIA is not down a lot more. Yeah, I think it's really bad for sure. But I'm talking to people and they're like, NVIDIA is a zero. And I'm like, you use the Apple versus Steve Jobs analogy. If you bought stock when Steve Jobs went on leave and then passed away, you'd return a ton of money with Apple stock since that time. Yeah, but didn't he come back and, like, gone 2.0. I think Apple, this is Jobs leaving in 2015, not leaving in, like, 90. Okay, got it, got it, got it, got it. I thought you meant the original gone. Okay, Apple in 2015, looking back, is a problem. The thing is, Steve Jobs was not a maniacal guy who ran every single part of his company.

He was, yes, he was a maniacal guy who cared about every aspect of his firm. But at the end of the day, I don't think Steve Jobs exerted as much control over Apple as Jensen does over NVIDIA or Elon does over his companies. Really? I don't think so. I mean, I don't know Steve Jobs. I don't know Apple as well. I've only read some books. But, like, it doesn't seem like, like, he was absolutely so tremendously important. But, like, I just don't think it's the same level of, like, work. Steve Jobs is a pure visionary. and Jensen is negotiating every supply chain contract and Steve Jobs is not doing that. So Dylan, how do you think if they start faltering, on what dimensions will they start faltering? I think Rubin, if there's any manufacturing issues with Rubin, people are distracted and Jensen's not there. Things get solved slower. Things get solved by committees. Things don't get escalated up. I mean, I don't know how many times at Semi-Analysis as if we fucking emailed Jensen for a thing to get solved. Like, what the fuck? Like, why are we emailing Jensen to fix something on some open source software?

And yet that's the only way we get it solved. And we're irrelevant, right? Like, compare that to, like, actual companies in the space. How often is it Jensen going out there and solving a problem? From what I've heard from everyone around the ecosystem, it's a lot. How many times is it, like, you know, Elon tells Jensen something, Jensen goes and tells his team, and the team fixes it. Because the team was trying to work with the team. Yeah. And it doesn't work out. all of these examples of the reasons why NVIDIA would technically have problems going forward, I think we're actually already present with Jensen at the helm. Like, they have a big problem with all the custom chips coming up. Yeah, exactly. But I'm saying Rubin could slip, the yield curve could look worse, Feynman could slip, Feynman could be not as aggressive. You know, one of the popular stories I love saying is like, Volta didn't have Tensor Cores until three months before tape out. Jensen is the one who fucking decided this. Right. There's bickering little people. And Jensen's like, no, AI is the way. Let's do fucking tensor course. Like this is this is like and it's like, fuck everything else. I don't care that, you know, we're three months away from tape out and you say it's going to take six months to incorporate the change. You're going to do it. You're going to do it now.

and stack on 100 of these decisions, Feynman's going to be much worse than it is, and it's going to come later. Ruben's going to be, could be, YieldRamp could be slower. RubenUltra could be slower. Oh, the D-Spec on RubenUltra would take longer to do, slash might not even get done, and therefore the volumes that NVIDIA can ship are lower. Like, there's a bajillion things that you can decide. XYZ things on software. Oh, yeah, like DeepSeek open sourcing all this software, and DPP, and like all this stuff that Moonshot's doing, and making KDA work. That shit's going to take forever to get up and running at high efficiency at NVIDIA relative to before. Maybe it's only a week, but each of these things and decisions and him driving and leadership and the supply chain giving them 70% of their supply instead of much less because it's Jensen, all of these things are exacerbating, and it could be like in 2029, the best chips aren't NVIDIA's, and they don't have the majority of the supply chain. Yeah, well, I mean, that's relevant to the stock, right? But I think this is 2026, not 2022. there are lots of other competent teams who are running at this

in a way in which there kind of was only one before. NVIDIA is still the fair watermark. NVIDIA is still the leader. They are still driving the industry. If NVIDIA slows down, it's not like someone else accelerated. NVIDIA slowed down until someone else is the best. Yeah, it's like a question mark maybe depends on your situation for inference. No matter what, the industry is progressing slower. Hardware progresses slower without Genset at the helm of NVIDIA, period. Yes, there are competitors, but without NVIDIA in the lead, people are running less fast, or even if they're running as fast as they were before, because NVIDIA was in the lead and they're no longer as relevant, progress has slowed. This is a real slowdown. In progress. This is pretty morbid for all of us here. I mean, it's sad. This is very Shakespearean. Dude I was so sad I been a Jensen fanboy since I was a teenager I don think people understand how much I fucking look up to the man and love him It crazy

It's sad, the circumstance. I think a lot of us were always impressed by NVIDIA. And just to see, I think a lot of people trying to excuse conduct that's like, it's just so bad to read about this. I see all the memes about it. I mean, I don't know. Dude, the memes are fire. This is probably some of the best memes in, like, you know, the memes the past few days is up there with, like, Republican primaries in 2014-15. Like, the memes are that fucking good. I laugh and then I'm sad. That's what the memes are doing to me right now. So Elliot Spitzer, you know, as a little high schooler into politics, he was my hero. He was like crusading against corruption, governor of New York State. And then it comes out, he had passed an anti-prostitution law. And then it comes out that he was, you know, had $2,000 an hour escorts.

And then he has to leave the governorship. And that was my wake up. realized these men with egos aren't necessarily all they're cut out to be moment. So, you know, it's not surprising, but it is depressing, and it just kind of reminds you about how, you know, humans are frail and, you know, don't ever meet your heroes. But I don't know, man. Like, we could still look up to Lisa Su, right? She's still there for us. Like, Dylan, who's your dream new NVIDIA CEO? Who are we putting in if we can snap our fingers? If I could snap my fingers, Lisa Sue, but I don't think she'll do it. Charlie Kowalski, Johnny Kowalski, Charlie Kowalski. Charlie Kowalski would be the best. How about you, Jordan? Well, if Charlie's on the table, I'll just say Hawk Tan, man. Bring the guy in. Character pieces. I think Hawk is really good about businessmen. I think Charlie is really good at, is a bit more technical and less businessman than Charlie, than Hawk, even though he's a really good businessman.

I think that dynamic, you actually want Charlie. Yeah, I think my personal opinion is a lady named Colette Crush. I really look forward to working with her. Well, we do love Colette. She's great. There is no – I know you guys are buds. There is no way the CFO of NVIDIA isn't implicated in whatever has been happening with these chips. It's just – it's not possible. I could not – We don't know how deep this web goes. Yeah, we don't know how deep this web goes, but, like, I don't see how it's possible that, like, you know, Jensen and Collette don't both, aren't both, like, I don't know, yeah, it's hard. I mean, Collette's not the one that's in Asia, like, making the agreement, so maybe she could, like, pretend like, oh, I didn't know, I signed a lot of pieces of paper, like, I don't know. But, look, she's going to have to testify in front of Congress just how much she didn't know, and there's going to be, you know, congressional investigations to this. So, like, look, it may be true, but, like, the way – and that's kind of why you want the technical CEO

or why you want someone from outside because I just don't understand how, you know, someone who is deeply involved with the operations and kind of interacts with the client. Yeah, and the new CEO is not going to be called to testify for, like, days and days and days, and they get to focus on the company. yeah look i think um the fact that this originates from the intelligence community uh kind of rules out the fact that the person who's immediately installed at c at ceo has like in-depth deep knowledge of it like the board has clearly been briefed on something initially that rubio knew back in may before they did the visit to china and stuff i i think that would be really strange um it's not that no it's not the chinese spy it's it's it's like look the all the fast was Supermicro, it's not the affair anymore. It's Supermicro, it's Megaspeed, it's chip smuggling into China. And the sort of willful covering of your eyes. Willful ignorance, yeah. I think anyone who's kind of

complicit in that is going to have a really hard time staying out of the line of fire of all this. Yeah, I'm watching the Supermicro indictment really closely to see how they actually play out prosecuting this stuff, because they flipped the guy who was doing the hair dryer stuff, taping, moving the stickers, who deleted his encrypted messaging app the day he got arrested. And apparently he's working with the prosecutors now. So we'll see, you know, what happens there, right? Like there's not really obvious ways to hide this stuff and be willfully ignorant in the technology-connected, you know, Internet world that we live in right now where you're trying to do things in Taiwan from the U.S. So we'll see. But I would find it, again, I would find it really strange if they immediately installed somebody who was, like, completely complicit in all the same stuff that Jensen was that's motivating the change. I don't know.

I hope not. I hope not. I hope she does a great job. I hope she delivers all our new chips online and brings me AGI, but we'll see. Any closing thoughts? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I think the closing thought is just that there's potential that NVIDIA just goes into civil war here over this because she's interim, she's not full-time. I think there's a constant clash in any company between finance and technology and sales, kind of three big areas. Sales wants to do deals. Technology wants to make big bets. finance needs to figure out how to pay for it. Finance is in charge now. Well, we know what's going to happen to the NVIDIA business going forward. It's going to be probably very profitable for a little while. And then medium to longterm, it's probably going to look a lot different, but yeah, closing thought on like maybe the political side is just like, I hope, I really hope the people that are, yeah, I've really hope. I think this stuff through guys.

Yeah. Please. I think, like, you can be a hawk and have a debate on, like, Rasa, but it's hard to have a debate on. Yeah. It's obvious. Like, anyway. We'll be watching closely, guys. Yeah. Tune in for more. I tweeted on Monday. I'm like, I did my emergency pod. Or, we should, let's just end it. Say it. What's up? Oh, no. I was, I think I did my emergency pod on, like, Friday, I was like, oh man, how many days is it going to take before I have to do another one? Six days. Okay. So I turn around. The daily emergency pod. That's what we're saying in terms of every single one of our pods has to be named emergency right now. It's just like, yeah. See you next week. Dylan, what do you think is going to happen next week? How can we go? How can we ramp up from here? We thought we had a crop across the capital markets, but now the CEO going with the most valuable, most important company in the world goes away.

What are we doing here? What can... 27, they said China wakes up to AI in November. So we've got a big bear awakening. Next November? No, we've got to nationalize Anthropic and SpaceX. And then, you know, Dario gets thrown in jail. Oh, no, no, no. I'm just, like, for season two, you know, we've got to up the stakes, right? for our next emergency pod. Like, you know. If they want us to go crazier. Just to be clear, how do you think functionally it plays out to nationalize a company of that size? I have no idea. No, it's not actually going to happen. Sorry. We've got to end this podcast like three weeks later. We lost it. We lost the thread. They have multiple forms over. Okay, we can cut all this. I mean, I know Jordan's a... I mean, yeah. I know Jordan is a socialist and he loves and admires China so much. So... Wait, what? no no Schneider Schneider Schneider oh Schneider you need to pass some more power law

AI you know AGI like there needs to be some legislation around it I don't think the executive cut this word out but what I'm getting at is that I think you're just we are watching the nationalization of NVIDIA play out right now this is the equivalent of Jack Maugh disappearing I don't think so at all I disagree completely all he had to do was not sell chips to people smuggling them to China, and she would have been fine. That's all I had to do. Yeah, so he does something against the national interest and the National Intelligence Committee comes in, takes him out, and installs somebody that they have more influence over. Yeah, when you break the law, there are consequences. Don't break the fucking law. Yeah, just don't break the law. Okay, sorry, guys. Sorry for the confusion, Derek. He can advocate for all he wants. He can scream to the rabbits. He could have done age 20 all he wanted to, and he didn't break the law. He didn't break the law. Wait, all you're saying right now is he deserved to be nationalized, which, like, fair enough. No! No, there's a switch between don't break the law and nationalize.

This is a fucking massive chasm. Are you saying that they are not, this is not... They are not nationalizing NVIDIA right now. That's crazy. No chance. Absolutely no chance. Absolutely no chance. What is the difference? What would they have to do for it to look like nationalization to you? I don't know. What nationalization does it mean to you, president? Sir, what does nationalization mean to you? Does it mean a CEO? Yeah, they have to mean a CEO. No. I don't know. Any of the people we've said for CEO are not nationalizing the company. They're just logical CEOs. Right. So let's see who it is. Jared Kushner for CEO. When Donald Jr. becomes CEO, then we'll know really who was behind this from the beginning. Oh, my God. I don't know. Okay. Maybe this is too far gone for you guys, but I think that's exactly what's happening right now. Anyway, cut this part out. Well, it's aligning a country with the laws on the book.

Leave it in, Jordan. All right. All right. We'll leave it in. Leave it in. All right. You guys got on camera looking back at my wild conspiracy theory. Press the button. And this. And I didn't. End this. Everything. Here. Financial advice. Don't come after me, please. Wait. The Match Act. All up in your fab. It's gonna shut it all down more Free rides, no more, we'll see Don't circle back, you answer to me Make us one more scanner out that door Hide, I'll hold the plug on your whole damn door Every scanner, every screw

If I can't, then neither can you Every scanner, every screw I could call every crew Match it, or I'll make you Every scanner, every screw If I can't, then neither can you Every service call, every crew Message, or I'll make you 5% tornado, babe, I'm so proud Now 0% de minimis, say it out loud Nikon, say cheese, now say no Tokyo Electron, put the etcher down slow B.I.S. got slow guys in a back machine Still the scariest office I've ever seen Did you like the true popples at our reception? We sorry, no export exception. 36 to 8 in markup we play. Now put us in my big beautiful NDA. My, my, my, my, every skin or every crew. If I can't, then neither can you.

My, my, my, my, every call, every crew. Smash me or I'll make you. Can't we keep having productive conversations? Just ask us nicely, take it slow Three years of that, no text, no citation Repeat after me, N-O Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma, you can't accept the groove If I can, then neither can you Ma-ma-ma-ma, you should call it the groove or I'll make you my my my my my my my my policy of denial denial my my my my my my my