China

“25,000 people work here. It's like acres and acres and acres. Like you can just walk around this city for like, you know, hours and just only see Italian, French, and German architecture.”

“Malaysia has emerged as this neutral place where all, every company, yeah, all the AI companies are building data centers there. Because it's right next to Singapore, which is a massive trading hub, but then it's also independent between like China and America…”

“Even, I've tweeted about DJI before, but that, that Americans buying a spy network for China is like the most insane thing.”

“Retooling supply chains takes decades. And because it's not just, it's like you say like Chinese made batteries, but it's like, well, what are the ingredients to those batteries? Where'd those come from? Who does the packaging? What about the machines that pac…”

“The biggest US drone maker, Skydio, which supplies Ukraine, faces a supply crisis after China bans the company from selling batteries to the group.”

“He actually called out Skydio, which is one of his portfolio companies who got their batteries embargoed by China, and now they're hunting around for new batteries.”

“China manufactures 99% of it.”

“It's absolutely insane that, you know, we wouldn't want China directly controlling, you know, one of the top three largest media companies and that it's in tech talk is objectively one of the biggest media companies, even though it's a social media platform.”

“And every consumer product and hardware company today will tell you that everybody goes out and they look at the whole world. Where can we make this thing? And they always end up in China because China's half the cost and the products and outputs better and it…”

“In China, a lot of the venture funds are state funded and the founders have to sign like a full personal guarantee. So if you raise five million dollars and your company doesn't work out, they're going to take your house to like repay it.”

“You know that in China you can't drive Teslas near, Tesla sells very well in China, but you can't drive Teslas near the Forbidden City because they know that they have cameras and they don't want Tesla mapping. Yeah. That area.”

“They will let you come and they will let you build, but they will stall you. They'll kick you off banking rails. They'll do all this stuff to just make it so that you cannot succeed over there until a Chinese clone is able to copy and learn enough about your f…”

“In fact, you can't drive a Tesla next to the Forbidden City because Teslas have cameras on them, and they don't want Tesla sending that footage back.”

“It is impossible for us to build a cheap drone in America because the labor cost is not even that much lower in China anymore. Like that, the whole like labor arbitrage, it's cheaper to hire someone in China that disappeared a couple of years ago and it's move…”

“It's basically impossible to build a competitor to DJI in America just through the American supply chain. Even if you assemble it here, your motors, your batteries, everything's going to come to China.”

“In a. Near peer conflict. If drones actually are an important aspect, you know, player in that, we will not be able to compete purely on an output basis. So even if we were to have a better product, say Andrel has a better product than DJI, it just purely on a…”

“I'll go out on a limb to say this is China's next attempt at a DJI TikTok type. Product where, hey, let's basically sell this product in America for way less than it costs. Give it away for free. Try to get a bunch of important, you know, companies using it or…”

“China is actively working to catch up in chip fabrication with SMIC and SME. So they have their own TSMC, they have their own NVIDIA, and they have their own ASML.”

“The 70, 77% of Chinese agreeing with the statement, AI will lead to many new jobs created in my country, contrasts pretty, pretty dramatically with America's 36%.”

“The main thing from my point of view is China has repeatedly shown that they're willing to lie, they're willing to sell things for less than they cost to make in order to get an edge in the U.S. Market, and I do think this is, again, the default state of any i…”

“In the three months ended October, 27, 20, 24. So like deep chip ban, just not last quarter, but the quarter before Q three 7.7 billion dollars of chips to Singapore. And it's like, Singapore's not buying that many chips.”

“They just announced the equivalent of like five hundred billion dollars of new Like state funded Investment.”

“So Sheen manufactures their products in China, and then instead of sending a single shipping container that would have a value far higher than 800 dollars, they send the individual packages from China direct to consumers.”

“China has wrapped up, has ramped up these de minimis exports from about five billion dollars in 2018 To sixty five billion dollars in 2023.”

“The company said its earnings report, it said in its earnings report that sales dropped in China by more than 11%, missing the twenty billion.”

“China has a, is no longer adding people to its major cities. There's actually been an exodus from cities, which is a whole other issue in China right now, leading to Peter Zai Han has a good bid on You know, basically how much oversupply there is from a housin…”

“So in 2024, carrying sales in Asia Pacific, including China, declined 30% due to weakened demand.”

“LVMH is counting on strong US demand to power its growth in the coming years. After sales in China, the second biggest market plunged around 20% last year.”

“Apple has huge advantages in the US. They have their moats, which is like messaging, payments, the developer ecosystem. They don't have that in China because of WeChat and these sort of super apps. And so somebody can just trade for a cheaper phone and get lik…”

“When Porsche launched its IPO in 2022, it leaned heavily into comparisons with Ferrari, but the stock has fallen by almost a third since its debut among, amid challenges in China and a botched electric vehicle strategy.”

“Well, spicy is that look, Chinese are ahead of us and it's very dangerous politically, geopolitically.”

“China has now confirmed that they're gonna fly Pakistani astronauts to the Chinese space station.”

“On the Chinese side, they don't have anything that is anywhere close to landing, but they're clearly just willing to throw manufacturing and bodies at the problem where I think it's something like SpaceX has launched 27 times so far this year. China has basica…”

“China is beating out the US in patents around neural interfaces. They've been doing that, I think, for a few years now. So they've really taken the lead.”

“The alpha of being a foreigner doing business in China. Is like a 19 eighties, 19 nineties, you know, first half of the 2000 story. And then sort of your only alpha as a foreigner in China was not even like, you know, working at Microsoft China or whatever, wh…”

“China has a really remarkable advantage in scale and manufacturing scale. And the US, like, it's not just the cost of labor, it's the experience, it's the network and it's the kind of like, 25 years of learning that all these firms have been doing to get to th…”

“I think the one difference is that there is more money that flows directly from firms to journalists in China. So the sort of discount factor that you have to apply to Chinese technology coverage is, Specifically positive technology coverage or even negative t…”

“There's a whole lot of memory sitting, sitting in warehouses and in China that they'll be good through for at least the next two years.”

“We don't buy for them because they got spyware all over this stuff.”

“You need the water though, so unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems, which China largely is, and cloud seeding in addition to that, it's a non-starter.”

“So I think like the expert controls and whatever are wise.”

“I was in China a few months earlier, and it was really striking to me how dismayed the venture capital system there felt and the tech ecosystem generally, because after the 20, 21 crackdowns, people are just like really pulled back.”

“The sense I got was that they are more concerned, like, whether it's young people or just whatever people want to consume, Is often more focused on practical matters. And if you listen to Joe Rogan, it's very much like, Let's just shoot the shit about whatever…”

“China's program managers in their space program, they fear the consequences of failure and NASA's program managers do not. And that is the key difference.”

“I think if China, our geopolitical adversary is attempting to harm us by giving us solar panels subsidized at their taxpayer's expense we should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping, which is buy as much of it as you…”

“My experience in NASA was that the organization is you know, it's still stuffed to the gills with brilliant people, but most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work, like actively being blocked and hindered an…”

“I grow increasingly concerned that we are just frankly behind. In terms of the model development, the application of hardware and the synthesis they're in both from a hardware standpoint, from the software standpoint, and then critically the ability to test.”

“You're about to see a couple of IPOs. So corn is coming soon. We think we've heard that China's coming soon and I've heard that a bunch of others are coming soon.”

“So the Asia Pacific fight with China, clearly that's a water-based conflict that's coming.”

“Yes, we have the data centers and the better models, but China, you know, has the batteries, right? They have like that. That's one area where they have leapfrogged us and whether it's electric vehicles or robotics or drones, like we need to have our own batte…”

“China has very strong expert controls. Like the reason TikTok can't sell is because algorithms in general are expert controlled. And so they would be able to buy the brand name and like the offices, but they'd have to completely re revamp the algorithm, which …”

“There's sixteen billion dollars of orders for age twenties just sort of sitting in limbo about to go at the door.”

“The last 40 years we've specialized in, you know, higher education, knowledge work, legal management services, Hollywood, you know, the creative class, all this stuff that is going to like be deflated and China will have the factories that will become fully au…”

“China added 446 gigawatts of energy last year. It was a 20% year over year increase. They're going to do that again this year. We added zero net new energy. We had a lot of renewables, but it came directly out of coal and other sources.”

“China was a currency manipulator through throughout a lot of the 2000 and early 20 tens, but it really, that really hasn't been the main way that they cheat. They cheat by basically suppressing household consumption and, you know, having these 60% saving or sa…”

“China specifically, I do think China's playing unfairly and they're our enemy and we shouldn't let our enemy get data on the United States.”

“I think they've delayed the decision and it's probably going to be coupled with the tariff situation too.”

“Like, the genie's out of the bottle. China versus America. That race is already going on. Nobody's gonna slow down and everybody wants glory. Nobody cares about the other people or something. Everybody wants glory and some kind of power to control the future.”

“There's, they have no, you know, not only do they have coordination, I mean, there's just no divisions at all between their military space, civil space, and even their commercial space. It's all just one big industry Blob of activity that's, you know, we can't…”

“Like the number of amphibian shipping vessels to actually take people from mainland to Taiwan. They have around 20, 20 or 30. They're actually capable of crossing that.”

“Building GPUs is actually much easier than the US government thinks, which is why it, which is why Amazon's doing it, Microsoft's doing it, Facebook's doing it, Broadcom's now a trillion dollar company, and the second is that their actual ability on the Foundr…”

“We won the internet because we were free and open. China's winning AI because it's free and open. Not because they care about that.”

“The actual modes around the information asymmetry that we have as a nation towards China on the advancement of chips is much smaller than we think. And I think it's, like, under 12 months.”

“Like the Chinese, like, I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to like a lot of the American startups like Unitree, for example, which I'm sure you guys have seen those videos, like they have built an entire team to build actuators a…”

“The typical utilization rate of a factory in America is less than 2000 hours a year. This, the comparable number in China is 7500 hours a year, right? Like there's 8700 possible production hours in a given year. The vast majority of American factories are sitt…”

“Like in China right now last year, there were about 400,000 robots deployed in the entire U S we had about 30,000 robots deployed. So less than a 10th.”

“Like similar to what China does actually in the U S we've had subsidies for small, medium sized factories for the last 10 years to buy automation equipment. Right. There, there's accelerated depreciation. A lot of states have matching grants, where if you buy …”

“China is investing in the three D printing space. They are building, you know, huge factories full of these conventional machines. They don't have our technology. They don't have the ability to, you know, they can go make A hundred laser, whatever number laser…”

“Like Deep Seek is serving all of China on 2000 GPUs.”

“I've been personally sanctioned by China. I cannot enter China. Brink has now been sanctioned by China twice. So we're not allowed to buy any parts in China.”

“Well, our drones are NDA compliant, meaning that we don't utilize any electronics from China whatsoever. No processors, no radios, no imaging sensors, like none of that stuff.”

“The way to do this playbook, John, is the way we kind of already are, which is sell all the chips into Malaysia, and if Chinese companies wanna sort of run their cloud out of Malaysia and Singapore, then okay, and we can shut it off, If and when we decide we w…”

“The diffusion rule that the Biden administration put out at the very end was really a play to force them to pick sides. And basically the deal was like, look, if you want access to the future, if you want access to compute, then you really got to play ball wit…”

“My guess is that like the reason it has taken so long for COMAC to get its shit together and build competitors to Boeing and Airbus is Is probably the fact that it is state owned and there are just like poor incentives going on versus the sort of free market …”

“The twenty-nineteen U.S. Trade, it was kind of a wash. And you can sort of write it off because the US economy was growing and we weren't picking a trade war with every other fucking country on the planet.”

“There is no reason. NVIDIA does not need the money. It's like two billion dollars of revenue. Like, they will be just fine without it”

“They're delivering. Like, you know, if you look at, you know, sort of China's, you know, sort of plans from 20 18 and sort of where they are today, they're not totally off track on, you know, sort of what they promised they'd be able to do, right? They've esta…”

“That entire French thing, I'd basically, you know, sort of pinpoint back to the nuclear submarine contract. Basically, the United States ended up moving a chunk of nuclear submarine contracts out of France over to Australia. The French were furious. Macron, yo…”

“The, you know, articles that came out yesterday talking about you know, NVIDIA basically getting, you know, sort of slapped on the wrist because they were like, we're exporting. I forget what the number was, but like, twenty billion dollars per year of chips t…”

“I tend to think, I think you should never underestimate, you know, sort of your, you know, enemies. And so I tend to take the China bull case and assume that is the default.”

“They have nothing equivalent to like Starlink generating billions of dollars, you know, of commercial, you know, sort of revenues that you can use as infrastructure to build off of.”

“Look, like, you know, with like, let's say magnets, we do a lot of like, you know, the rarest mineral production of those, you know, magnet precursors, but the actual, like, you know, sort of final synthesis and refinement that all happens in China. But a part…”

“Well, like, who do you think is going to do that? It's going to be Google, Meta, OpenAI, right? It's going to be those companies, right?”

“Yeah, it's a little bit, so like, so you've had a 60% decline in bookings of ocean freight from China to the US. That's resulted in a 25% decline of sailings.”

“And China has really benefited there because there are so many more PhDs than there are here, and it's much cheaper for these companies to hire them to do these dense labels for the video data.”

“China recently, I think on the last time I was on TVP and I talked about how they had a three hundred million dollar annual budget for their weather modification program, that as of 2025 has been up to 1.4 billion dollars.”

“One thing that we do know about the weather mod program that they do have going is that they're planning to build a hundred and a 100,000 ground generators on the Tibetan plateau.”

“China recently, I think on the last time I was on TBPN, I talked about how they had a three hundred million dollar annual budget for their weather modification program. That as of 20, 25 has been up to 1.4 billion dollars.”

“But in building, ah, a 100,000 of these ground generators, and also using the Wing Long II and a bunch of their other military drones for aerial cloud seeding they're turning Tibet into, ah, a reservoir, a snowpack reservoir of unprecedented scale that will fe…”

“I think it's been net positive for the world that China has been so enthusiastic about open source AI coming out of China which has been great.”

“So it's now probable that China will quote unquote beat NASA back to the moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.”

“By default, I don't see TikTok as like a uniquely a uniquely Chinese cultural export. It's a technology.”

“Wong Ning is now the 10th richest person in China. He's worth twenty-eight billion dollars.”

“It's doubling in China, but it's also like seen maybe like a 10 X increase in in international sales over the last two years.”

“Public money, backstops, bailouts seem like the natural endpoint of how AI is discussed at these levels.”

“There is a, there is some level of an acceptable argument to this idea that if you continue to push Nvidia chips there, it just makes the Huawei Ascend just a little bit less exciting.”

“That even if we give China chips, they will still spend as much as they need to in order to catch up themselves.”

“If AGI happens in 15 years, China is more likely to get it because they're on a steeper energy ramp than we are. But if AGI happens sooner, and it's, and it is just sort of an algorithmic breakthrough, like we do have an advantage in America because we have mo…”

“Badminton is live streaming in China, and you can adjust whatever angle you want.”

“Trump says that the United States will allow Nvidia H 200 chip sales to China and get a 25% cut.”

“Yes, but I still think there's enough of like a market force within China that if we flood the market with cheap Nvidia chips, there will, it'll just be expensive for them to keep propping up their local industry.”

“Now Nvidia can sell to China, but they got to pay 25% to Uncle Sam.”

“This particular operation has just uncovered a hundred and sixty million dollars worth of illegal AI chip smuggling.”

“This is like 10% of their revenue is going to be in China next year if they really take the handcuffs off.”

“Nvidia is estimating that they will be able to sell five billion dollars of chips to China every quarter.”

“We never seek trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, we hope to be the world's market, too.”

“One dynamic that's interesting is China has obviously a massive advantage in robotics. And right now we have a, an advantage in the models.”

“They have Guo Wang, which is their, like, state-led effort, trying to get to 13,000 satellites by twenty-thirty. Currently, they have around a 150, and then there's Qian Fan, which currently has around a hundred, also trying to get they're trying to get to 15,…”

“China is, like, the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors, and it has been since 2005, so they want to buy semiconductors. Obviously US trade policy oscillates, but semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China.”

“China imports 74% of its oil supply and 42% of its gas supply.”

“The foreign luxury market in China, so European conglomerates sending their goods to China, it actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20%.”

“In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported Three hundred and fifty billion worth of semiconductors which was more than the value of the crude oil it imported that year.”

“China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high quality products at affordable prices, but creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than build. Like this is the one thing you buy inste…”

“I think Anthropic does not sell AI access to China. You know, they loop it through, and you can see this in the traffic data. They go through Korea and Japan and other places, but like, and so they get it.”

“And my argument is, like, more economic in the sense of, like, if you sell them, like, tens of billions of dollars of equipment, they can make hundreds of billions of dollars of AI value, or chips, with that equipment, whereas if you sell them AI model access,…”

“China has enough, like they can actually make, looks like decent inference chips. They just can't make the chips they need for training, right?”

“The thing is, is the corruption is just sort of like, it's another tax. It still works. Right? Unlike maybe other countries, you still get it done. It still works pretty well, but some folks, you know, but then you make a little money on the side.”

“Data centers, energy, obviously, you have another guest who talked about it's not an issue for China, right? It's somewhere they could build as many data centers as they want, as long as they can get the chips. That's the bigger issue.”

“I mean, I think that the Chinese helped Takeichi because their reaction to her comments in, in early November, which again, she said, she reiterated the Japanese position on sort of a Taiwan contingency, so to speak. She said it in a setting where it hadn't be…”

“They have like this AI plus plan they rolled out a couple months ago, where it's really to embed AI throughout the economy and throughout society. And so they're not really focused on As much as sort of getting to AGI and these massive models, they're really m…”

“China's got the Lunar New Year's coming up next week and Lunar New Year's Eve, the CCTV does this big spring festival gala with, you know, hundreds of millions people watch. It's going to be full of robots.”

“I mean, China has a supply chain for this stuff, and we still don't, and so whether or not these regulations will pull that supply chain creation here, it remains to be seen.”

“What's interesting, right, I think it was the Financial Times reported last week that even though, ah, like, the Department of Commerce has signed off on the licenses to sell to China the H 200, that the Department of State, or the State Department, which has …”

“There's a ATM in China that melts your gold. Cash for gold. At 1200 degrees Celsius and transfers money straight into your account.”

“If the US is manufacturing a quadcopter and China's manufacturing the same quadcopter, if we're making a cruise missile and they're making the same cruise missile, they will out-manufacture us.”

“Regardless, you're talking about orders of magnitude more production than the U.S. Has right now, which is, serves as a wake-up call.”

“Look, I mean, unfortunately in a modern day, I think a hot war would end relatively quickly. Like you're talking about a very decisive outcome when you think about cyber effects and how quickly infrastructure in both countries would shut down. When you think a…”

“I said then, and I still believe now, the biggest threat to the U.S. Let's call it AI hegemony is, is the Chinese open source models, and the developers even in the US that are working on their own are using those, and you can see that on all the tables that a…”

“I also think that there are things we could learn from China about how to run infrastructure in the US. They're clearly better at it than we are.”

“If we get super heavy on U.S. Regulation, you may find there's a fence around the U.S. And China serves the rest of the world.”

“What happens if we get super powerful AI and China doesn't? What are they going to do? The optimal thing would be to just bomb TSMC out of existence, because suddenly that becomes optimal, even with all the costs that that does, and then what?”

“I think it is a safer equilibrium To have China dependent on Taiwan than to try to cut them off from Taiwan while we are dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan is 70 miles off the coast of China. It's not an ideal position in the world for us to have a dependency on it a…”

“If AI is what it is, The people with guns are going to want to have a say. Whether that be domestically, whether that be internationally, that might be in the context of the U.S. Government just taking it, trying to kill your company because they feel you're n…”

“China conducted joint sword. 20 24 B exercises in October of 2024. Surrounding Taiwan with coordinated military operations. In December, 25, Justice Mission 25 deployed over a hundred aircraft, 90 crossing the median line, 13 warships, and 27 rockets fired fro…”

“In 2024, China had just 9.3 billion invested in private AI companies. There's four hundred seventy billion cumulative since 2013, more than all other countries combined. The U.S. Produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 versus China's 15.”

“So they have more reserves relative to their imports than we do relative to ours. If you think about ours, we have about 400 in the SPR and we can release about four million a day.”

“This is a have-have-not world. It's going to be either us or them basically deciding the world order. Because, like, these other countries, and maybe India will get involved, maybe the Arab, non-Arab, Middle East, but currently on the trajectory we're on now, …”

“Because any, whether it's China or Vietnam, any country, if you're outside the United States, you immediately have a cost advantage, not the manufacturing, but just from an IP, from a, and from an Amazon cost perspective.”

“And one thing that kind of went under the radar, Jensen literally said at GTC they got license approvals on both the U.S. And China side, so we're gonna see billions of dollars of H 200 orders.”

“The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a 15 year low in March. Some farmers are losing over 40 dollars per animal.”

“Like you would have, if you had a ride sharing company, there were a 150 other ride sharing companies that you had to kind of get through just to then win your city, to then go and compete with all the other cities, to then at the end compete against Uber in C…”

“I think the President Xi in China is easier to predict than President Trump.”

“It would be extremely foolish to create two ecosystems, the open source ecosystem, and it only runs on the Chinese tech, a foreign tech stack, and a closed ecosystem, and that runs on the American tech stack. I think that that would be a horrible outcome for t…”

“They manufacture 60% of the world's mainstream chips, maybe more.”

“As you know, most of the AI researchers in all of these AI labs, most of them are Chinese. They have 50% of the world's AI researchers”

“China's going to do a trillion in GMV this year and stuff sold.”

“Then some members of the Manus team were detained briefly in China on business.”

“China has blocked Meta's two billion dollar acquisition of artificial intelligence platform Manus after regulators reviewed whether the deal violated Beijing's investment rules.”

“We have a hundred fission reactors being built in China. We have one in the United States.”

“Yeah, so I think what sovereign AI will look like for essentially all countries really other than the United States and China, although I think China is going to fall further and further behind, is just some sort of, you do, you use you know, you use one of th…”

“You know, they have this crazy belief that, oh, you know, our own internal chips are good enough. They're not.”

“It does seem like the pace of open source development in China is slowing.”

“Worth noting that the Justice Department has already cleared the merger while China and other international regulators have raised no comparable, comparable objections thus far.”

“Open source and is coming and is here, whether we like it or not. Of course, a lot of it will be from China. We should allow American competitors to proceed on an even footing, but basically the attempt to outlaw it or ban it or use sanctions against it is goi…”

“I think if Europe starts a major trade war with China, Europe will lose.”

“So Waymo is sourcing like almost all the parts for the new Waymo's from China, but they are building them, I believe in the United States and all of the software is from Google or Alphabet or Waymo.”

“So 5000 units were delivered from each unitary and adubot. By comparison, U.S. Companies, including Tesla and figure, shipped only a few hundred robots each, if that. China is also estimated to control about 85% of the global humanoid robotics market, and also…”

“Countries like China are bringing online one gigawatt of nuclear capacity every other week, which is insane.”