China

“The Chinese have much more focused interests. Of course they want us to think well of China. They want to suppress anyone who criticizes China. And they're probably in the long run a lot more competent and capable and persistent than the Russians.”

“The big problems with the metaverse are things like you know, studies out of China have shown it's more addictive, or more habit-forming like substantially more so than phones, because it's immersive.”

“And so, on the Chinese thing, I just think it would be so insane for him to remove those labels that he, I don't think that he would do that.”

“They're not that afraid of, let's say, you know, Things like long range surveillance drones that have to operate off of 5000 foot runways, because they know they're gonna bomb those runways in the first day or the first week of the war. They're, what they're t…”

“I think that China and Russia, they actually don't have interests that diverge. And so it's actually pretty cheap for them to agree with each other.”

“In the world where they happen within a few years, I think what you're looking at is China has a ton of leverage over the United States because they, one of the things future AI could unlock is things like pocket nukes, right? And so China is ahead. They could…”

“I mean, you mentioned that 2030 is when the patent comes off of Ozempic, but actually in China, that patent's off now.”

“I think there's a view that that's just very low likelihood that that's going to happen. Now look, in Hong Kong, you definitely sense some seat changes in terms of what we see, but look, we're always going to have these sort of, as Stephanie talks about a lot,…”

“First off, they've gained about 300 bips of market share in China in the last two years.”

“The biggest opportunity is you have a hundred million iPhones in China that are in a window of an upgrade opportunity.”

“But Alex, if you look at comps, the next year, China's gonna be up 15, 20%, and that's why, like, the bears, when they come out of hibernation mood with iPhone mathematical gymnastics trying to scare people, the reason the stock's not doing anything, because i…”

“So we have 55 megapixels of cameras on our vehicle. It's the largest number of megapixels on in outside of China.”

“So, my expectation is that they will actually deploy AI to their military faster than the U.S., even though the U.S. Is ahead on the core technology.”

“If we were to rack and stack versus China, we're ahead on algorithms. We're ahead on compute computational power, thankfully due to a lot of the export controls that the commerce department has put in place. And then on data, it's a little bit of a jump ball.”

“One undeniable trend over the past, let's call it five years has been the sort of the collapse of the Chinese startup sector. And this is really driven by policies from the CCP to significantly, you know, they killed certain startup industries. They really lik…”

“I think this is going to be One of the under the line battles that really defines the course of the next few decades of geopolitics.”

“I do expect that the new admin will come in and help accelerate things to enable the US to compete more aggressively with China and ultimately come out ahead on the technology.”

“If you believe that there's some potential of some kind of conflict over Taiwan or other, some kind of other, like, hot conflict between the US and China then we really, the United States needs to ensure that we have the best possible AI technology to ensure t…”

“It's for sure, it's impressive what they've been able to do. And you know, I think that's something we're going to have to think about how to keep the western frontier models in, in the lead. I think they still are at the moment, but you know, for sure China's…”

“The constraints that were put in place by the US because of the, you know, everything going on with chip constraints and sort of forcing AI companies not to export to China you know, led to sort of this very interesting cauldron that I think could only happen …”

“The problem with most people's default modes of regulation, including a lot of regulators and including a lot of European regulators is you say, well, our job is to protect bad things from happening. And by the way, the simplest way to do that is to prevent an…”

“And I do think that the, it's the right thing for the U S to be doing, given that China is generally taking a kind of a mercantilist competitive position. And I think that's something that the U S and other you know, kind of countries Europe and everything els…”

“China and multiple companies within it, because, you know, I haven't evaluated yet. Minimax, which also just came out recently, but will have a number of very strong contenders for this in the world technology landscape.”

“This idea that it's six million dollars or whatever to run is ludicrous. It obviously cost over a billion dollars to train the model before it eventually got to the point where it could run off of that six million.”

“I don't think that's a crazy idea. I mean, I don't want the Chinese model for a lot of things, but you know, there are some, certain things the Chinese are pretty good at. I think that we can, if we can regulate, you know, the argument I make in the book about…”

“If the US were pulling ahead both Russia and China may have a substantial interest in saying, hey, cut this out. Pulling ahead to develop super intelligence, which could give it a huge advantage and an ability to crush crush them. They'd say, you don't get to …”

“And there was an article that I did this week about how in China something like 80% of the build out of their data centers for AI is, is currently unused.”

“Apple is still, 15% of its revenue in Q-IV was coming from China, but that wasn't the 18%. And that has dogged Apple revenue for quarters.”

“I give it like a 70% confidence level that they negotiate some deals. I think the China tariffs probably stick.”

“We have on April 17th, no one's talking about it right now, but they're in 10 days, they're going to impose fees on ships made in China when they make a port call in the US. It's going to totally rearrange the shipping networks and make ocean freight incredibl…”

“In terms of frontier models, the U S companies, like you mentioned, the open eyes and the tropics of the world have definitely led China's LLM development by far for a long time until deep sea made a breakthrough.”

“China's still not a very heavily depend is not heavily dependent on knowledge workers, Compared to the U S where it's like, 60% of GDP is driven by knowledge workers.”

“I don't think it's a deep seek moment for China. Because I think it did not fundamentally change how we Believe AI is being developed, right? Like in the sense that Deepsea completely challenged the scaling law and what we believed in more capital is better tr…”

“It's definitely also hindering Chinese, like, you know, AI development. For sure, that's probably Biggest bottleneck because we talked about it. It has innovation. It has data. It has energy. It doesn't have chips. So unless domestically, you know, we see like…”

“Even the companies that have enterprise softwares like Alibaba or ByteDance, those products are their minor businesses. So it's the whole internet economy is so dependent and reliant on consumer facing applications.”

“Clearly there's a lot of GPUs that have gone through Singapore and then go right to China.”

“We've seen very little consumer AI in the U S very little. And so they're actually putting it into play, which is interesting.”

“Chinese entrepreneurs now no longer are just driven by money and making money. They're driven by recognition, influence, and power. And a lot of them are like visionary start off with and not businessmen to start off with.”

“Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of DeepSeek and his whole team, they're actually educated in China.”

“There were 21 robots that ran the race and six crossed the finish line, including one that crossed. This is the one that crossed is called The Tiangang Ultra, it finished the race in two hours and 40 minutes, which I would say is respectable.”

“60% of the company's e-commerce sales came from third-party merchants? Okay. Come from third-party merchants that get many of their products from China and then sell on Amazon's website.”

“Nvidia, which sells a lot of chips into Singapore, and I think we can say with a good deal of certainty, many of those end up in China, is not happy about this.”

“The company's revenue reached forty-four billion for the first fiscal quarter, for its first fiscal quarter. A 69% increase That was curtailed, so limited to just a 69% increase that was curtailed by Washington's new limits on China chip sales.”

“And what's more important is that they're adding an America sized amount of power every couple of years. It might be more longer than every couple of years. Whereas our power production has stayed flat for the last many decades.”

“And if anyone tries to use tariffs to harm China from gaining economic power, we know it can't work because it's supply chains can move.”

“Yeah, it's gonna only be three, maybe four countries. It's China, USA, Japan, and Germany.”

“Really, there are, there's only two places where AI innovation's taking place, is the United States and China.”

“Stablecoin usage is only 20% in the US. Almost 60% of stablecoins trading takes place in Hong Kong, China, and Japan.”

“And in absolute terms, the most impressive military buildup the world has ever seen ever is happening in China right now.”

“China's building a hundred nuclear weapons a year.”

“Even the Indian iPhones and whatever is still like most of the components are coming from it from China.”

“I didn't check this week, I've been traveling, but it's probably 5000 or so from China to the United States. States. ... It was at two a couple months ago. Before the tariffs hit.”

“Not amongst our customers. I haven't seen any flow into the U.S., but I'm seeing it There's a ton of movement out of China.”

“I mean, 30% from China, it's set to go back to 54%. On August 18th, I want to say 18th is the ninety-day, it's because it's just a pause on the China stuff, so you had a pause of 90 days from April eightth for rest of China. You had a ninety-day pause till Jul…”

“Tariffs are currently 30% plus whatever was pre-existing, so that's a pretty big deal.”

“It was at one 45 for five weeks. And so, during that five-week period, the volume of cargo from China to the US dropped by 60%.”

“So those things could be very disruptive and lead to inflation, but current level, 30%, it feels like brands will mostly absorb that and not pass it. They'll pass it through a little bit, but it's, remember, this is 30% on the cost.”

“Well, you have to import the goods and pay duties on the components, and then, ah, your product is now more expensive to produce, and if you instead produce that, those goods in Mexico that didn't have the tariffs on Chinese goods, you wouldn't, your cost woul…”

“It went from, see if I can remember my stats on this, it went from a 100,000 packages a day to four million packages a day in the last decade, clearing under de minimis. Now to, 70% of that was China, so now, you know, we've eliminated 70% of that in the last …”

“Right now, China produces 40% of the world's manufacturing output. U.S. Post-World War II, we were at 47%.”

“You're not in China anymore for cheap labor. Like, you're there because they're the best at manufacturing things. Which is a really interesting story over the last 20 years that they became the highest quality manufacturer. Not just the, not, they're not the c…”

“Tariffs got relaxed back down to 30%. We've had a 80% increase in volume from China to the U.S. Above the pre-tariff levels.”

“We know that the Nvidia chip, which was prohibited for sale in China, it probably slowed it, but we would be on a fool's errand if we think it's going to eliminate the ability of the Chinese to do these things.”

“I am one who believes that if somebody's going to win the race on these frontier technologies, it had better be a democracy. Because if something goes wrong in AI, and it's quite possible that something will, as a matter of fact, it's probable that something w…”

“Look, I'm not saying that the Chinese won't move on Taiwan. I just think that the idea that they're just kind of one day, you're going to start to see the Chinese, ah, ships, Navy, Air Force, ah, landing on Taiwan. If you talk to most military people, they say…”

“China once led the world in online education startups. They shut all of it down.”

“China has done very well taking American discovery and innovation and then creating a market for it.”

“If we were going to stop Chinese indigenous development, we would have had to do that 1015 years ago before they really did Develop the ability to innovate indigenously.”

“There is just quite simply not enough power that exists in the United States or around the world or anywhere really apart from China to drive these data center ambitions. It just doesn't exist.”

“This for, to a large part, is how China is going to power the future of data centers and AI with solar energy.”

“I don't think China is ahead, but I don't think they're behind.”

“One of the reasons I left at AWS and I loved being at AWS. I worked on 63 of the services there and built a lot of them myself, worked on quantum computing and robotics and a whole bunch of things is I was worried a little bit about government adoption of AI a…”

“Jensen is not shown. I mean, he he's lobbied hard to sell chips into China. So if this was really an issue and you really cared about it, you would not be doing that.”

“I would be very surprised if that is a workable strategy for the U.S. And at some point, I think there's going to be quite a big sort of falling of the scales from the eyes when they realize you can't beat, you certainly can't beat China like that. And I suspe…”

“Their best way of accessing the U S markets is by just giving the things for free. And so it does make sense. It's a very natural thing to do to build a business in China, which is protected. Then to export the thing for zero.”

“I think there is some merit In the argument that you're closer to a very large industrial base, and you can prototype fast, you can build things fast, you can fail fast, and I think those things are helpful in developing the technology”

“Fully autonomous weapons, I don't, if that's the direction that warfare is going, I feel like that's just gonna be part of whatever China or other countries are developing anyway, so it's just gonna be kind of as awful as it may sound, it's going to kind of be…”

“I think this will be the source of economic and national security going forward. I think it's going to be about national competitiveness and that there are other countries like China where AI pulls in the exact opposite direction.”

“I think if you think about the biggest military buildup in world history in China, and you think of it, you've seen the purge of the generals and sort of the military hierarchy there,”

“It's going to be one of his biggest legacies is he kept Apple, whether it was through his showdown with the FBI around privacy The navigating, like, the tough political waters that a company like Apple does. Right. For better or worse, right? Because certainly…”

“We never Integrate into perplexity any product that, or API that is hosted in China. We have ourselves post-trained. We have post-trained open source models. That, that come that are developed by Chinese labs. We run those in US data centers. We post-train the…”

“But with voters, that dog does not hunt. They're not going to say I'm willing to lose my job and I'm willing to have my kid never really have gainful employment. I'm willing to pay higher energy prices so that China doesn't win. And so I think those in the ind…”

“The conversation around moving towards deep seek and adding it into your agentic process or adding Chinese models did not exist in any conversation I was in 12 months ago and now is in almost every conversation, at least as an option, because cost has become s…”

“Nvidia has run out of places to grow. They can't sell to any more countries. They can't sell to any more hyperscalers. They can't sell to any more. Even they're going after the enterprise market, which is messy and complicated and difficult to actually make a …”

“Chip companies, the design companies in the US do not plan for this. The contingency plan, excuse me, is something along the lines of like, well, we're all kind of screwed if China invades, which, OK, but like, there's no real plan there.”

“Chip companies, the design companies in the US do not plan for this. The contingency plan, excuse me, is something along the lines of like, well, we're all kind of screwed if China invades, which, OK, but like, there's no real plan there.”

“It seems to show that China's open source movement is not the 10 or 15 months behind US AI, but maybe four or five months at the very, at the most, maybe even less than that.”

“I think there's absolutely no way you get China to agree to anything like that. I think there's it's impossible at this point. And I think a enforcement of anything like that would effectively be impossible.”

“These chips are not something you can really control. We have found that in that the Biden era controls on silicon have created a massive industry in China”

“It's said that, you know, a lot of these robots, whether they're humanoid or industrial robots, the raw kind of hardware itself can be like at least 50% cheaper than produced elsewhere.”

“I think both, you know, DeepSeek and Kimi, if not seen as kind of the top two labs right now coming out of China, both founders have openly talked a lot about management of people you know, removing distractions, really focused on the pursuit of AGI, not kind …”

“And I think maybe because of China's embrace of open source and because of the U S closed AI model we might end up seeing a proliferation of individual AI apps in China while the U.S. Goes to super apps.”

“The fact is, I think, 30 years ago, for any average Chinese immigrant to go to North America, it is a no brainer, because the quality of life in almost any major city is going to be higher than a major city in China. But that kind of, I'm not talking about pol…”

“China's energy infrastructure side is not a problem, so if you have enough electricity and power to be powering these chips, even if you need to use double amount of energy, that's not a Kind of a bottleneck for the AI compute side.”

“Personal reason I think is the main driver for most people, honestly, like I I've spoken to researchers where hate to overgeneralize, but their wives or spouse or whoever are maybe teachers, lawyers you know, healthcare professionals in China. And those are no…”

“When we started on that journey right before COVID it was roughly one data center a year. That was being built, and today, one a week, and 50% of them are in the United States, 30% are in China, and 20% everywhere else”

“And so the Chinese premier has been recently cautioning the provincial governors, stop building so many data centers because this is now the new thing.”

“I expect you'll see the same phenomenon, albeit with a little less social consequences once all of this turns out to be, it'll be much like what happened with their overbuilding in apartment buildings and residential and industrial space over the last decade.”