Singapore’s main complaint is that the FBI/DOJ didn’t compel Supermicro to cooperate fully with their investigation. It’s very possible cronyism played a part with this administration, but given that the DOJ brought charges against Supermicro executives earlier this year and subpoenaed the company, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were simply focused on their own investigation and/or didn’t have the legal authority to force them to cooperate.
This is a bizarre statement from Singapore to be honest.
Why would the US “compel” a suspect they are investigating to cooperate with an investigation in a foreign country?
Can anyone name a investigation in the past where one country “compelled” a suspect to cooperate with a foreign power?
People have to keep in mind Singapore loves to sit on the fence of US-China relations ask I can also imagine the US doesn’t feel like Singapore is going to be much help anyways.
Not sure if you actually read the statement or just skimmed the titles but it seems like Singapore is just offering their side of the story and I don't see any "compelling"
Also what does Singapore's foreign policy have to do anything here? The statement states it already begun investigations once it saw that there was some foul play.
Senators Wyden and Neal just opened an investigation.
They spell the accusation right out:
WYDEN AND NEAL BEGIN TO INVESTIGATE ADMINISTRATION SCHEME TO TAKE CUT OF NVIDIA AI CHIP SALES TO CHINESE COMPANIES; TRUMP AND COMMERCE DEPARTMENT REPORTEDLY IGNORED WARNINGS ABOUT FORMER CEO’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ALLEGED CHINESE SPY
I think all can be true at once, this is an administration staffed by extractative people, Alice Huang wasn't hiding the affair's meetcutes on her public Wechat, Megaspeed is forwarding the GPU's to mainland Chinese buyers just like everyone else, the US export control ban is the law, the law is dumb and ineffective and creates the opportunities
I’m not intimately familiar with all the specifics here but your take seems reasonable and metered to me. Obviously people shouldn’t take everything they read as fact but it doesn’t appear any grand claims are being made.
She is more like a ttpical opportunists. The spy thing just not fitting. A matahari usually low profile and has a value target. Jensen simply dont carried GPU blueprint in his jackets. It makes more sense to have spy as employee to siphon data out (which were common problem back couple years ago - which those that caught were just a few). Being spy and openly tell everyone is just stupid....more like what CIA would do but unlikely a Chinese spy. You can ask Taiwanese how good Chinese spies in the old days. And the best part, check who started the spy rumor. It is a hit job .
You're going to need to explain why you think the law is dumb and ineffective.
Or at least dumb, we know it's ineffective because the people in charge are comically corrupt, and we have a new and deeply established culture of complete impunity for elites.
But you'll have to justify your response on policy grounds to be taken seriously.
the export ban is both reactionary to the idea of a superintelligence arms race, and retroactively rationalized as letting preferred nations and customers get these chips in the supply crunch
these goals have failed as China's frontier labs closed the inference gap to just a few months or weeks of what the US frontier labs have released
there is also an extremely high degree of utility as all the best open weight models across almost all modalities are from China and released for free, downloabable, portable, for commercial and non-commercial use alike
as the chips are highly liquid commodities, they are an extension of global capital, capital will flow and capital controls merely introduce intermediaries and additional cost
in my view, the spice must flow
trying to put China in a cage has resulted in accelerating their supply chain growth, EUV machine development that will make them immune from inevitable sanctions if they pursued their regional geopolitical aims, building at parity multi modal models with less compute, and so more much beyond what 2022's initial bans in the Biden administration could even imagine these AI would be used for, the Trump administrations continuation and partial more surgical expansion is within an established conduit for intermediaries to extract value from participants
It would be the US taking a 25% cut in the form of tariffs:
“Under the scheme, Nvidia chips manufactured in Taiwan could be sold to Chinese companies if they were first imported into the United States for a security review, which would require payment of a 25% tariff under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a trade law designed to address imports that threaten national security. Then the Commerce Department would grant Nvidia an export license to sell the chips to Chinese companies.”
The way it works is that it is a completely made up reason just to require the chips to cross the US border so the administration can use this as a bullshit reason they don't have to follow the constitution.
I'm convinced there's a good chance Trump blackmailed Huang for that cut (same playbook as Epstein). If Trump had that information, as has been widely reported, he'd use it.
Given Trump "truthed" today about how Tim Cook should step in and take over Nvidia I imagine he is just going down his list of people that donated the most bribes to the new ballroom.
If you observed him and his action, hard to negate he is not Chinese or Dems moles. He is the greatest promoter for China and Dems. In fact in China, citizens there widely recognize him as one of modern China nation builder!
If you have travelled around the world in the last few years you have seen the absolute total dominance of Chinese electric cars.
I just don't understand this American elites view that cutting off China from acquiring Nvidia chips will result in a strengthened American position instead of getting obliterated by SMIC+Huawei.
It’s not hard to “dominate” when you sell something at a loss. I can go to Australia and sell a $50,000 vehicle for $30,000 and it doesn’t make me a “shrewd businessperson”
In fact, China has been quite transparent about heavily investing and subsidizing key industries to dominate export markets.
Proliferation of something doesn't mean it's dominant. Android has the dominant global market share, but Apple makes all the money.
W.r.t the United States government and its people restricting sales of the most advanced chips form Nvidia there are two realistic conclusions you can draw (neither of which result in SMIC and/or Huawei "obliterating" anyone):
1. China is behind and needs to catch up, and the way to do that is through subterfuge to get more chips imported into the country. In other words, they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already, and so it doesn't matter whether the US restricts the sale or not other than maybe a few billion dollars in lost sales to a few companies which isn't really relevant.
With respect to Chinese electric cars and the American market, the American market is highly profitable and while we don't have great EVs we also don't really need them for anything, and while China maintains a stranglehold on rare earth mineral processing we can't put ourselves in a position where an adversary can effectively shut down our auto industry and leave us in a bad position. Of course there are existing single points of failure, chokeholds, and things like that, but there's no need to add fuel to the fire.
Most Chinese automakers are not competitive, the Chinese auto market is slowing down, and many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies and have built factories which are not able due to lack of demand to produce the volumes of vehicles that were expected. American strategy (and soon European strategy) to limit imports of Chinese vehicles results in a resounding win for union jobs, stability of American, European, Japanese, and Korean automakers, and uses what I'll describe as a judo move (using your opponents strengths and momentum against them) to harm the Chinese economy and their goal of instituting mass manufacturing overcapacity.
2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
Have you looked at Huawei Ascend chips? They are on a 7nm process, so at first blush you could say they're not competitive. I think they run at at between 15045% the performance of Nvidia's fancy chips (Grace Blackwell etc) and also consume a lot more power, presumably requiring more power again to dissipate the resulting heat.
On the plus side, though, they're designed from the group up to sit in massive arrays have 4tb of memory interconnect bandwidth. My understandin g is that model providers like Deepseek are doing their training on nvidia gPUs but all the inference is moving toward Huawei.
At some point they'll be caught up, either via lithography breakthroughs, or by building on their architectual strengths.
> which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
Because they don't have TSMC or ASML and the Dutch can turn those lithography machines off from the other side of the world. Nvidia is likely the least important part of the supply chain which is why governments were not very concerned with the behavior which they would have been aware of for a while.
Sure but you can throw both of those companies in there. I think it just adds to the point.
Nvidia might be the easiest to replicate (I'm not sure if that's true or not) but my point was that you can draw the conclusion either they can't actually replicate this supply chain so they are behind and are importing as many chips as they can get away with or certain companies are trying to (which may not be a distinction since many Chinese companies have CCP officers inside the company), or they can do it and haven't... but that doesn't make any sense because they would obviously want that entire stack.
1. It's not just about profit. Sometimes it's really about market share.
2. You live under a rock it you don't see the earthquake that Chinese automakers are. Or chip makers. You seem absolutely oblivious of the world around you. Something US CEOs that travel the world extensively are not.
3. European carmakers are by nature export oriented and they oppose tariffs on Chinese cars, especially German carmakers. Reality is that neither European nor US carmakers (and many other technological sectors) can't keep the pace with Asians, whether it's making ships, steel, chips, tvs, or cars. We just don't. It's only US car makers that can be happy of those measures, because the cars Americans make suck, are ugly, expensive and inefficient. You had a brief period with Tesla being some kind of innovator in the space, but that's also over.
The reason this is happening is because we are deferent to Wall Street. It's impossible for extremely high returns on capital to coexist with a robust and growing manufacturing sector.
Wall Street can and does demand that companies pay them dividends instead of investing in capacity. What you need is a willingness to accept lower returns on capital and higher savings rates. China makes those things happen, and that's why its manufacturing sector is able to grow the way that it does.
American technology and European technology are, of course, top-notch. What's different is the required return on capital and the labor market. Both of those are primarily dictated by industrial policies of the respective governments.
> It's not just about profit. Sometimes it's really about market share.
No it's never just about market share. Market share and accumulating it would just be a means to an end of either eventually making a profit, or squeezing out competitors to raise prices later. At the end of the day you'd 100% of the time rather be Apple (it's objectively irrational to suggest otherwise) than another player in this space.
Besides the American market which is where the profits are is also the second largest market by volume. In China the car companies are struggling to make money because of state subsidies, aggressive pricing, and very intense competition. Those companies that are looking to survive are looking to global markets (primarily the EU and US) so that they can actually survive and make money. As they increasingly get shut out of these two markets China is in for a consolidation of automakers which will result in a lot of lost jobs and companies going bankrupt. China's internal auto market was down 22% YoY for example [1].
> You live under a rock it you don't see the earthquake that Chinese automakers are.
Please stop writing things like this as it's a violation of site guidelines.
> European carmakers are by nature export oriented and they oppose tariffs on Chinese cars, especially German carmakers.
That's false. You can do a cursory Google search for the latest here but in general the EU is taking action, led by Germany, to introduce tariffs or other market restrictions to slow the import of Chinese cars. Germany has been shedding 10s of thousands of jobs in the automotive and machinery sector.
> Reality is that neither European nor US carmakers (and many other technological sectors) can't keep the pace with Asians, whether it's making ships, steel, chips, tvs, or cars. We just don't.
This is also false. There's nothing special about "Asians" that enable them to make things. Countries like China by virtue of their incredibly deep labor pool enabled them to scale up mass manufacturing, but in the United States for example we can compete (and the Chinese are doing this too) with robotics and other automation tools. Most of our alleged inability to manufacture these products just stems from decades of industrial policy assuming that China in particular would be a welcoming and liberalizing partner but that assumption turned out to be false.
[2] I want to be clear here. While I detest the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party and all communist ideology, I'm not trying to suggest that China's auto market or manufacturers suck, or don't make great cars, or whatever. My point of view is that the arguments put forth about Chinese dominance seem incorrect to me as stated and I'm in principle arguing against the arguments because they're in my view bad, not because of anything to do with the Chinese.
I wrote that China's labor pool enabled them to scale up mass manufacturing. I didn't write that China only manufactures products with high-intensity labor or anything of the sort.
I also wrote that "but in the United States for example we can compete (and the Chinese are doing this too) with robotics and other automation tools.".
As you can see, I wrote, explicitly, that the Chinese are competing with robotics and automation tools, and I wrote that America can also do this, and we'll have to, because automation and robotics are the future.
You're so quick to be argumentative and jump to defend China that you are missing key points that others have written. Please engage with the substance of the post and what was written and stop with the low-quality comments. Thanks!
>they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
>China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
What about Huawei and their Ascend chips?
DeepSeek and z.ai now run their models on Ascends, and inference is basically a solved problem (especially with the architectural/ML optimizations, like 90% of them come from China right now).
From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need ~4 times more GPUs. Plus CUDA is a more mature stack than whatever Huawei provides (e.g. DeepSeek once failed to train on Ascends because they struggled with the stack). As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
>many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies
As opposed to many "successful" US companies living off investments without being actually profitable for years (or ever)?
> What about Huawei and their Ascend chips? From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need more of them. Slower = lagging behind the US further over time. As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
It's a catch-22 of sorts.
Either China can catch up (what exactly that will mean I'm unsure but I believe they will be able to), in which case we don't need to sell them the chips to let them do it faster, or they can't catch up in which case we shouldn't sell them chips allowing them to do so.
I'm just not seeing a compelling argument to sell them state of the art chips here.
> As opposed to many US companies living off investments without being profitable for years (or ever)?
> I just don't understand this American elites view that cutting off China from acquiring Nvidia chips will result in a strengthened American position instead of getting obliterated by SMIC+Huawei
It’s just a combination of wilful ignorance or otherwise being stuck in past modes of thinking of the US being ahead of the world technologically.
It’s not just elites, “USA #1” is an important aspect of American culture.
But regardless the policy is not the issue here, it’s the open corruption, allowing laws to be circumvented due to connections to the White House or people connected to them.
Coward Nutlick needs to be brought infront of congress, he's learned too much corruption and doesn't yet have the immunity to be that way. He will get his pardon though.
If US not helpful, why even bother to broadcast about their investigation? By the way, no evidence of wrong doing. They let go Alice. Smell a lot like being commanded to investigate.
Exactly! He himself called for the prosecution and execution of Democrats. And now, when Democrats are calling for his investigation, he is saying they are breaking the law LOL.
Delusional perspective. He did not actually do this, even though the voters gave him a mandate to do it during his first term ("Lock her up!"), and the number of and the content of bizarre prosecutions aimed at him after he left office popularized a new word in the English language: "lawfare." The public's disgust at it gave him a second split term, which hadn't happened before in US history.
He's as corrupt as can be, but the Democrats have been doing nothing but calling for his investigation, investigating him, and changing laws so he can be prosecuted for about a decade now LOL.
I googled the origin of "lawfare" - seems to be first used in 1957.
It has become a popular talking point for Trump supporters because it let's them delude themselves into thinking Trump is a victim of political persecution rather than "as corrupt as can be".
I'm not sure which investigations you consider bizarre either. They all seem totally reasonable to me - too restrained, if anything.
Here’s the actual statement: https://www.mha.gov.sg/media-room/newsroom/singapore-investi...
Singapore’s main complaint is that the FBI/DOJ didn’t compel Supermicro to cooperate fully with their investigation. It’s very possible cronyism played a part with this administration, but given that the DOJ brought charges against Supermicro executives earlier this year and subpoenaed the company, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were simply focused on their own investigation and/or didn’t have the legal authority to force them to cooperate.
This is a bizarre statement from Singapore to be honest.
Why would the US “compel” a suspect they are investigating to cooperate with an investigation in a foreign country?
Can anyone name a investigation in the past where one country “compelled” a suspect to cooperate with a foreign power?
People have to keep in mind Singapore loves to sit on the fence of US-China relations ask I can also imagine the US doesn’t feel like Singapore is going to be much help anyways.
Any investigation for which letters rogatory issued. Probably hundreds.
Clearly not this though? Since the US never asked for assistance?
Not sure if you actually read the statement or just skimmed the titles but it seems like Singapore is just offering their side of the story and I don't see any "compelling"
Also what does Singapore's foreign policy have to do anything here? The statement states it already begun investigations once it saw that there was some foul play.
Not sure what you're getting at tbh
Senators Wyden and Neal just opened an investigation.
They spell the accusation right out:
WYDEN AND NEAL BEGIN TO INVESTIGATE ADMINISTRATION SCHEME TO TAKE CUT OF NVIDIA AI CHIP SALES TO CHINESE COMPANIES; TRUMP AND COMMERCE DEPARTMENT REPORTEDLY IGNORED WARNINGS ABOUT FORMER CEO’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ALLEGED CHINESE SPY
I think all can be true at once, this is an administration staffed by extractative people, Alice Huang wasn't hiding the affair's meetcutes on her public Wechat, Megaspeed is forwarding the GPU's to mainland Chinese buyers just like everyone else, the US export control ban is the law, the law is dumb and ineffective and creates the opportunities
I’m not intimately familiar with all the specifics here but your take seems reasonable and metered to me. Obviously people shouldn’t take everything they read as fact but it doesn’t appear any grand claims are being made.
> Alice Huang wasn't hiding the affair's meetcutes on her public Wechat
What?
She is more like a ttpical opportunists. The spy thing just not fitting. A matahari usually low profile and has a value target. Jensen simply dont carried GPU blueprint in his jackets. It makes more sense to have spy as employee to siphon data out (which were common problem back couple years ago - which those that caught were just a few). Being spy and openly tell everyone is just stupid....more like what CIA would do but unlikely a Chinese spy. You can ask Taiwanese how good Chinese spies in the old days. And the best part, check who started the spy rumor. It is a hit job .
Do you think they infiltrated Jensens phone or laptop?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=meet-cute
You're going to need to explain why you think the law is dumb and ineffective.
Or at least dumb, we know it's ineffective because the people in charge are comically corrupt, and we have a new and deeply established culture of complete impunity for elites.
But you'll have to justify your response on policy grounds to be taken seriously.
the export ban is both reactionary to the idea of a superintelligence arms race, and retroactively rationalized as letting preferred nations and customers get these chips in the supply crunch
these goals have failed as China's frontier labs closed the inference gap to just a few months or weeks of what the US frontier labs have released
there is also an extremely high degree of utility as all the best open weight models across almost all modalities are from China and released for free, downloabable, portable, for commercial and non-commercial use alike
as the chips are highly liquid commodities, they are an extension of global capital, capital will flow and capital controls merely introduce intermediaries and additional cost
in my view, the spice must flow
trying to put China in a cage has resulted in accelerating their supply chain growth, EUV machine development that will make them immune from inevitable sanctions if they pursued their regional geopolitical aims, building at parity multi modal models with less compute, and so more much beyond what 2022's initial bans in the Biden administration could even imagine these AI would be used for, the Trump administrations continuation and partial more surgical expansion is within an established conduit for intermediaries to extract value from participants
What is the basis for “take a cut”? Is there any reporting on that? These crooks…
It would be the US taking a 25% cut in the form of tariffs:
“Under the scheme, Nvidia chips manufactured in Taiwan could be sold to Chinese companies if they were first imported into the United States for a security review, which would require payment of a 25% tariff under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a trade law designed to address imports that threaten national security. Then the Commerce Department would grant Nvidia an export license to sell the chips to Chinese companies.”
https://democrats-waysandmeans.house.gov/media-center/press-...
A security review... of the physical chips? With an electron microscope or something? How is that supposed to work even on paper?
The way it works is that it is a completely made up reason just to require the chips to cross the US border so the administration can use this as a bullshit reason they don't have to follow the constitution.
Well exactly the same way our friends at tailored access operations perform security reviews;
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...
and the totally believable response from cisco;
https://sec.cloudapps.cisco.com/security/center/resources/cu...
This administration never ceases to amaze me
They're referring to tariffs. Full letter here:
https://www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/11122026wydenneal...
A quarter of all H200 proceeds from China: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/trump-nvidia-h200-china-ai-c...
They didn't ignore, they exploited.
I'm convinced there's a good chance Trump blackmailed Huang for that cut (same playbook as Epstein). If Trump had that information, as has been widely reported, he'd use it.
I imagine Trump got paid, that's why.
Given Trump "truthed" today about how Tim Cook should step in and take over Nvidia I imagine he is just going down his list of people that donated the most bribes to the new ballroom.
He's right though. Who's the second best option?
Tim Nvidia doesn't quite have the same ring to it
Tim GreenApple
If you observed him and his action, hard to negate he is not Chinese or Dems moles. He is the greatest promoter for China and Dems. In fact in China, citizens there widely recognize him as one of modern China nation builder!
Ah yes. That might partly explain all this brouhaha just after the midterms and just after the spectacular republican defeat.
Indeed so
https://web.archive.org/web/20261112181528/https://www.nytim...
If you have travelled around the world in the last few years you have seen the absolute total dominance of Chinese electric cars.
I just don't understand this American elites view that cutting off China from acquiring Nvidia chips will result in a strengthened American position instead of getting obliterated by SMIC+Huawei.
It’s not hard to “dominate” when you sell something at a loss. I can go to Australia and sell a $50,000 vehicle for $30,000 and it doesn’t make me a “shrewd businessperson”
In fact, China has been quite transparent about heavily investing and subsidizing key industries to dominate export markets.
Proliferation of something doesn't mean it's dominant. Android has the dominant global market share, but Apple makes all the money.
W.r.t the United States government and its people restricting sales of the most advanced chips form Nvidia there are two realistic conclusions you can draw (neither of which result in SMIC and/or Huawei "obliterating" anyone):
1. China is behind and needs to catch up, and the way to do that is through subterfuge to get more chips imported into the country. In other words, they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already, and so it doesn't matter whether the US restricts the sale or not other than maybe a few billion dollars in lost sales to a few companies which isn't really relevant.
With respect to Chinese electric cars and the American market, the American market is highly profitable and while we don't have great EVs we also don't really need them for anything, and while China maintains a stranglehold on rare earth mineral processing we can't put ourselves in a position where an adversary can effectively shut down our auto industry and leave us in a bad position. Of course there are existing single points of failure, chokeholds, and things like that, but there's no need to add fuel to the fire.
Most Chinese automakers are not competitive, the Chinese auto market is slowing down, and many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies and have built factories which are not able due to lack of demand to produce the volumes of vehicles that were expected. American strategy (and soon European strategy) to limit imports of Chinese vehicles results in a resounding win for union jobs, stability of American, European, Japanese, and Korean automakers, and uses what I'll describe as a judo move (using your opponents strengths and momentum against them) to harm the Chinese economy and their goal of instituting mass manufacturing overcapacity.
2. China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
Have you looked at Huawei Ascend chips? They are on a 7nm process, so at first blush you could say they're not competitive. I think they run at at between 15045% the performance of Nvidia's fancy chips (Grace Blackwell etc) and also consume a lot more power, presumably requiring more power again to dissipate the resulting heat.
On the plus side, though, they're designed from the group up to sit in massive arrays have 4tb of memory interconnect bandwidth. My understandin g is that model providers like Deepseek are doing their training on nvidia gPUs but all the inference is moving toward Huawei.
At some point they'll be caught up, either via lithography breakthroughs, or by building on their architectual strengths.
> which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
Because they don't have TSMC or ASML and the Dutch can turn those lithography machines off from the other side of the world. Nvidia is likely the least important part of the supply chain which is why governments were not very concerned with the behavior which they would have been aware of for a while.
Sure but you can throw both of those companies in there. I think it just adds to the point.
Nvidia might be the easiest to replicate (I'm not sure if that's true or not) but my point was that you can draw the conclusion either they can't actually replicate this supply chain so they are behind and are importing as many chips as they can get away with or certain companies are trying to (which may not be a distinction since many Chinese companies have CCP officers inside the company), or they can do it and haven't... but that doesn't make any sense because they would obviously want that entire stack.
> can't actually replicate this supply chain
Can't actually replicate this supply chain yet.
1. It's not just about profit. Sometimes it's really about market share.
2. You live under a rock it you don't see the earthquake that Chinese automakers are. Or chip makers. You seem absolutely oblivious of the world around you. Something US CEOs that travel the world extensively are not.
3. European carmakers are by nature export oriented and they oppose tariffs on Chinese cars, especially German carmakers. Reality is that neither European nor US carmakers (and many other technological sectors) can't keep the pace with Asians, whether it's making ships, steel, chips, tvs, or cars. We just don't. It's only US car makers that can be happy of those measures, because the cars Americans make suck, are ugly, expensive and inefficient. You had a brief period with Tesla being some kind of innovator in the space, but that's also over.
The reason this is happening is because we are deferent to Wall Street. It's impossible for extremely high returns on capital to coexist with a robust and growing manufacturing sector.
Wall Street can and does demand that companies pay them dividends instead of investing in capacity. What you need is a willingness to accept lower returns on capital and higher savings rates. China makes those things happen, and that's why its manufacturing sector is able to grow the way that it does.
American technology and European technology are, of course, top-notch. What's different is the required return on capital and the labor market. Both of those are primarily dictated by industrial policies of the respective governments.
> 3. European carmakers are by nature export oriented
Chinese cars are selling less in China (20% less this year IIRC) so that is the reason why they must sell abroad. Not that they are not good.
> It's not just about profit. Sometimes it's really about market share.
No it's never just about market share. Market share and accumulating it would just be a means to an end of either eventually making a profit, or squeezing out competitors to raise prices later. At the end of the day you'd 100% of the time rather be Apple (it's objectively irrational to suggest otherwise) than another player in this space.
Besides the American market which is where the profits are is also the second largest market by volume. In China the car companies are struggling to make money because of state subsidies, aggressive pricing, and very intense competition. Those companies that are looking to survive are looking to global markets (primarily the EU and US) so that they can actually survive and make money. As they increasingly get shut out of these two markets China is in for a consolidation of automakers which will result in a lot of lost jobs and companies going bankrupt. China's internal auto market was down 22% YoY for example [1].
> You live under a rock it you don't see the earthquake that Chinese automakers are.
Please stop writing things like this as it's a violation of site guidelines.
> European carmakers are by nature export oriented and they oppose tariffs on Chinese cars, especially German carmakers.
That's false. You can do a cursory Google search for the latest here but in general the EU is taking action, led by Germany, to introduce tariffs or other market restrictions to slow the import of Chinese cars. Germany has been shedding 10s of thousands of jobs in the automotive and machinery sector.
> Reality is that neither European nor US carmakers (and many other technological sectors) can't keep the pace with Asians, whether it's making ships, steel, chips, tvs, or cars. We just don't.
This is also false. There's nothing special about "Asians" that enable them to make things. Countries like China by virtue of their incredibly deep labor pool enabled them to scale up mass manufacturing, but in the United States for example we can compete (and the Chinese are doing this too) with robotics and other automation tools. Most of our alleged inability to manufacture these products just stems from decades of industrial policy assuming that China in particular would be a welcoming and liberalizing partner but that assumption turned out to be false.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/everyone-loves-chinese-ca...
[2] I want to be clear here. While I detest the authoritarian Chinese Communist Party and all communist ideology, I'm not trying to suggest that China's auto market or manufacturers suck, or don't make great cars, or whatever. My point of view is that the arguments put forth about Chinese dominance seem incorrect to me as stated and I'm in principle arguing against the arguments because they're in my view bad, not because of anything to do with the Chinese.
Nonsense, enter a Chinese ship, or car maker, and you'll find more automation than in western counter part.
BYD assembles 95%+ of their cars with robots.
You keep talking nonsense and stereotypes, exactly the kind of things that keep west non competitive in manufacturing and technology.
I wrote that China's labor pool enabled them to scale up mass manufacturing. I didn't write that China only manufactures products with high-intensity labor or anything of the sort.
I also wrote that "but in the United States for example we can compete (and the Chinese are doing this too) with robotics and other automation tools.".
As you can see, I wrote, explicitly, that the Chinese are competing with robotics and automation tools, and I wrote that America can also do this, and we'll have to, because automation and robotics are the future.
You're so quick to be argumentative and jump to defend China that you are missing key points that others have written. Please engage with the substance of the post and what was written and stop with the low-quality comments. Thanks!
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>they can't match Nvidia + American tech stack for the foreseeable future.
>China can "just catch up", which begs the question why they don't have their own Nvidia already
What about Huawei and their Ascend chips?
DeepSeek and z.ai now run their models on Ascends, and inference is basically a solved problem (especially with the architectural/ML optimizations, like 90% of them come from China right now).
From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need ~4 times more GPUs. Plus CUDA is a more mature stack than whatever Huawei provides (e.g. DeepSeek once failed to train on Ascends because they struggled with the stack). As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
>many of the automakers are operating on state subsidies
As opposed to many "successful" US companies living off investments without being actually profitable for years (or ever)?
> What about Huawei and their Ascend chips? From what I understand, they lack compute for training - their own chips can do it too but they're slower and you need more of them. Slower = lagging behind the US further over time. As long as China can buy Nvidia chips, it's cheaper and easier to just use smuggled chips but it doesn't mean they desperately need them.
It's a catch-22 of sorts.
Either China can catch up (what exactly that will mean I'm unsure but I believe they will be able to), in which case we don't need to sell them the chips to let them do it faster, or they can't catch up in which case we shouldn't sell them chips allowing them to do so.
I'm just not seeing a compelling argument to sell them state of the art chips here.
> As opposed to many US companies living off investments without being profitable for years (or ever)?
No it's not comparable
> I just don't understand this American elites view that cutting off China from acquiring Nvidia chips will result in a strengthened American position instead of getting obliterated by SMIC+Huawei
It’s just a combination of wilful ignorance or otherwise being stuck in past modes of thinking of the US being ahead of the world technologically. It’s not just elites, “USA #1” is an important aspect of American culture.
But regardless the policy is not the issue here, it’s the open corruption, allowing laws to be circumvented due to connections to the White House or people connected to them.
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To compel compliance with an investigation in a foreign country is achieved through the diplomatic device known as a "letter rogatory."
Coward Nutlick needs to be brought infront of congress, he's learned too much corruption and doesn't yet have the immunity to be that way. He will get his pardon though.
What happen to Epstin files lol, I wonder whats next after this... crazy world we are living in.
If US not helpful, why even bother to broadcast about their investigation? By the way, no evidence of wrong doing. They let go Alice. Smell a lot like being commanded to investigate.
I'm guessing Trump owns Supermicro stock, otherwise why would he tell the DoJ/FBI to slow-roll cooperation with Singaporean authorities.
i don't know, Singapore isn't a free or progressive country, it's more like the UAE or Kingdom of Brunei in terms of how the law works there
Probably because this 'spy' angle is manufactured by competing interests, and US wasn't able to be helpful to Singapore because of this.
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"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law"
Exactly! He himself called for the prosecution and execution of Democrats. And now, when Democrats are calling for his investigation, he is saying they are breaking the law LOL.
Delusional perspective. He did not actually do this, even though the voters gave him a mandate to do it during his first term ("Lock her up!"), and the number of and the content of bizarre prosecutions aimed at him after he left office popularized a new word in the English language: "lawfare." The public's disgust at it gave him a second split term, which hadn't happened before in US history.
He's as corrupt as can be, but the Democrats have been doing nothing but calling for his investigation, investigating him, and changing laws so he can be prosecuted for about a decade now LOL.
You wrote:
"He's definitely corrupt"
AND
"Democrats have been unfairly investigating him"
in a single sentence. I cannot fathom this.
If he's corrupt, how are Democratic investigations of him unjust? What are they supposed to do instead?
I googled the origin of "lawfare" - seems to be first used in 1957.
It has become a popular talking point for Trump supporters because it let's them delude themselves into thinking Trump is a victim of political persecution rather than "as corrupt as can be".
I'm not sure which investigations you consider bizarre either. They all seem totally reasonable to me - too restrained, if anything.
Say anything against the glorious gaslighter and you'll get downvoted around here.
Name one prosecution of Trump out of office that you consider "bizarre".
This is Grover Cleveland erasure.
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