China

“The one thing that would cause us to get way behind China is if we played without open source and they had it like us.”

“So I think there's a real chance that when we're looking at this, 12 to 18 months from now, that it's an absolute no go, that they can't find a middle ground and that the app is shut down.”

“It's hard for me to see a world where TikTok US is shut down or banned, where there's not some response by China.”

“They have over 300 plants currently either being built or in development. We have zero. Zero plants being built. I think 13 plants that are proposed according to this data that we have here.”

“The biggest problem, as I understand it, once again, from talking to experts, not from my own direct knowledge, but our cost of deploying new nuclear fission infrastructure is limited by our own regulatory framework, not by the technology.”

“And to stop thinking that you're gonna re-onshore a whole bunch of manufacturers, I don't think we'll be competitive globally.”

“South Korea is a democracy, A friend of the United States, they're at the same delivered price point as China, and they're doing it at scale, and they're starting to export their technology.”

“China's on track, on the other hand, to bring on more capacity capacity in the next 10 years than we've brought on in the last 40 years. They're expected to pass us in terms of total power generation from nuclear by 2030, or thereabouts.”

“We recently brought on two new plants in the U.S. Vogel three and four in Georgia, and the total cost of that was about thirty billion for 2.2 gigawatts. It turns out over thirteen billion dollars per gigawatt. The plants in China that are the equivalent level…”

“Power is the primitive for AI, and that's why China is heads down in this race, and they're taking our technology, right, and they're, you know, they're improving it”

“I don't think blocking ASML or blocking AI technology or blocking anything is working. It's just not working”

“The number of graduates in China's University system that are STEM is 35%, and that number is below 10 in the US.”

“I think the policy of American, of the American government to try and keep China out of the AI game is futile. I've always felt that way. I don't think it'll work. In this case, I actually think it backfired.”

“But I think if you, I think I can imagine that if you just poke China enough, if you keep poking and you keep poking and you keep raising the constraints, you increase the odds that they make a run at Taiwan.”

“You have the new kind of VC-backed defense companies who all, and maybe I kind of put Palantir in that group, but they all I think have an incentive To kind of have tension with China, if you will. It actually increases revenue. I call them the new neocons.”

“China buys three percent of our treasuries annually. It's tiny. They used to buy, you know, 10 years ago they bought 12% of our treasuries and everybody panicked that they were too big a buyer.”

“Their AI, you know, their chat GPT equivalent is number one in China, right?”

“China is going to have frontier AI and almost all of the things we do to try to slow them down and stop them are backfiring on the United States.”

“I could easily see us provoking Europe to the point where the ASML team just says, well, screw it. We don't care what you say. We're selling to China.”

“There's no, no way that lands, I think at 54%. That's the headline tariffs.”

“I think there's zero chance that you're going to stop China or somehow like I even, I use the phrase increase the gap.”

“I don't think we should be sending GB 200 or cutting edge chips to China. I think that there's a legitimate national interest in, you know, quote unquote, staying out in front on AI. I think there's a debate to be had about that. That's where I come down on th…”

“If we head in the direction of Navarro, it's quite clear to me that we're going to so anger the rest of the world that, ah, the chance that the rest of the world is going to run on US compute. I think what we do in that instance is you move everybody in the di…”

“We effectively have an embargo between us and China today, a 140% tariff, export controls, you know, and so we have to renegotiate that deal.”

“I think the distraction that we can keep China away from frontier level AI, that will be a losing strategy in my mind.”

“The thought that they couldn't, you know, be educated or can't innovate is gonna lead you to a lot of really bad policies.”

“There are a hundred nuclear power plants under construction in China. Power is not their limit.”

“There's also, if you're using the word resilient, you know, that can include other countries that are allies. It doesn't have to be on the shores of the U.S., and I know people who in the first Trump administration were told to diversify away from China, and t…”

“What we did last week is the US did ban H-twenties going to China”

“I think we're going to probably land somewhere in this kind of five to 10% terrace for the rest of the world. Right. If you add that up, that's going to be somewhere order of magnitude, two hundred billion dollars of tariffs, and you're not going to end up at …”

“These are about 60% of these materials are mined in China. Ok, so you do have other places on the planet that are, ah, mining these rare earths. The problem is, 90% of them are refined in China.”

“China implemented an export ban on rare earths on April fifth.”

“Almost everyone in the AI space that I see with a microphone in front of them says, The US has to win the AI war. I don't know what that means. And if I guess as to what it means, I don't think it's possible. And so. It's an infinite game, and no one that I ta…”

“I think NVIDIA sold, you know, 12 or fifteen billion dollars worth of H-twenties. So if you ban those, then your trade deficit with China goes up by fifteen billion dollars.”

“Both Tesla and Apple have a huge amount of revenue in China, and when you sense that this thing may be escalating or that there are ripple effects going back and forth, what one plausible thing that could happen is either one of them get kicked out of the coun…”

“Korea and China are delivering fission nuclear at one-fourth the price we are, and I think that Korea example, South Korea, is very important because that is a democracy. So here's one country that's authoritarian, one that's a democracy, and they're both achi…”

“They host all of these on us hosting services. And so they're not actually operating any of their customers workloads in China at all. And the data is all resident on those us hosting companies servers. And so there's no customer data in China either.”

“My opinion, and I think you share this, is China already has frontier AI. Huawei is already there. We have demonstrable evidence of that. And their models are already there. Arguably, their open source models might even be in front of the United States at this…”

“And I've said, you know, for a long time, the number one thing we could do would be to open up our border for skilled immigration from China as wide as we possibly can.”

“So I think what the market was saying is, okay, three hundred billion, half of that will show up as increased prices and taxes on consumers and on businesses. Half of it will get eaten by the producer of the product in China, in India, wherever, you know, that…”

“I saw a stat the other day. I think 50% of researchers, AI researchers in the United States of America are Chinese.”

“I think we were headed towards a path where we were going to have a wall around America and there was going to be America AI and then China AI was going to have the rest of the world, the opposite of the internet.”

“Once you invest in something, you just start to adopt the mouthpiece for it and make a lot of arguments that are central to that company's success. And I think that's happening now that we have a large number of VCs in the military space.”

“I think that we could still see as part of the negotiation over the next 90 days, I would not be terribly surprised to see NVIDIA allowed to sell some form of deprecated chip into China”

“And if you put China at 30% on strategic at 15% on non-strategic and the rest of the world roughly at 10%, you come up with about three hundred billion in tariffs, okay? I just told you that last year tariffs were seventy seven billion, so that's still a forex…”

“There does seem to be in China, and I, and part three of this research walks through this, a deprioritization of market cap of successful companies.”

“And I believe now the patent count And AI coming out of China is larger than the US.”

“If we don't do this, then we're going to have a massively disrupted economy over the next six quarters, slowing down economic growth and causing problems and critical shortages in parts to the military, in parts to our US auto industry, et cetera.”

“If we keep the chip ban in place, here's my biggest concern. I think it dramatically increases the chances that China is forced to move on Taiwan.”

“If you just watch the pace of releases, the quality of the releases out of China, the cycle time on the innovation and the open source community out of China, it's faster and better at the moment.”

“You know, it seems like excess regulation on everything from energy production to model development to semiconductor chip distribution. It's really been a bit of an unforced error by the U.S. Over the course of last 24 months and handed a lot of momentum to Ch…”

“I think that there's going to be a big Chinese deal done before the year's out.”

“On the 24 members of the select committee for the CCP, and I think all but four of them have never been to China. And the ones that went, it was seven years ago.”

“You just have a much more natural environment to have this kind of hyper competition that we talked about in EVs or solar, like having that many open source providers gives you that. I would say even maybe more because of the way the models can help one anothe…”

“And then there's not that many R&B dollars available to the venture market. A lot of the, you don't have the foundations in, in university endowments that you do here. And the billionaires that have made wealth typically are looking to diversify offshore. And …”

“I'd probably put myself in this camp who thinks we have to compete. We have to re onshore industry. You probably should have some tariffs in order to achieve that, but you definitely can't decouple or ignore or antagonize.”

“The way to beat them is not to, you know, try to cut them off at the knees. We don't need to make it easy on them. But the United States needs to accelerate our race, and I think by, if we focus too much on how do we slow down China, we take the eye off the ba…”

“Jensen Huang reminded us recently that 50% of the world's AI researchers are in China, and they're indeed innovating and not copying.”

“China's gonna be far more biased by what they view as As fair and face saving than they are necessarily like numeric. And so I think if we, if someone were to approach them in a pragmatic way, I think a pragmatic deal could easily get done.”

“They are now facing problems, even though they're the world leader in EVs and the world leader in solar panels, where some of these companies need to go bankrupt, and a province may not want them to because of employment issues, right?”

“If someone said, Whose app is closest to open AIs in China? It's already an app from ByteDance that's out there.”

“If we have this view, the only reason China's competitive or winning is because they're stealing or they're subsidized. I think what that view does is it allows us to delude ourselves into believing we don't need to get better ourselves.”

“The vast majority of the political borough are former engineers. So this is the ruling party within China and that the vast majority of the people in Washington DC are former lawyers.”

“If you look at it today, the U S only represents about 14% of China's exports. The U S only represents about three percent of China's GDP.”

“You've seen these other charts where like 50% Of the AI researchers in America are Chinese”

“The reason I'm confident and I've said on this pod, That I think he'll get a big deal done with China.”

“Even though I tell all of our investors. That our guidance includes no China. And I appreciate all of our investors to include no China in any of our guidance.”

“And three, they're years behind us. Is it two years, three years? Come on, they're nanoseconds behind us.”

“You can't decouple against the single most The two most important relationships for the next century. That doesn't make any sense at all. Decoupling is exactly the wrong concept.”

“95% market share.”

“These things will get sorted out, and we will have the opportunity to go compete in that China market.”