Bret Swanson

“The goal is not to bring back old industries & old jobs with old capital goods [but] to help traditional industries — manufacturing, transportation, retail, healthcare, food, education, energy — to transform…using a mix of physical capital and cutting edge technology.”

Before going off half-cocked on the Jensen Huang case, we ought to ask how Beijing thinks it benefits, writes Holman Jenkins on.wsj.com/4iTD03o

Something that merits more discussion amongst those who believe it was a mistake by both the Biden and Trump administrations to allow the export of less powerful GPUs to China: Since the summer of 2025, it has increasingly been *China*, not just DC, blocking Nvidia GPUs in China. Within weeks of Secretary Lutnick saying the goal was to get Chinese developers "addicted" to the American technology stack, Beijing began pressuring its tech giants to stop buying the H20. Then it ordered them to stop buying the RTX Pro 6000D, sent customs teams to the ports to crack down on Nvidia chip imports, and barred foreign AI chips from new state-funded data centers. And as of last week, Reuters reports that roughly 600,000 H200s are sitting in Hong Kong because Beijing won't approve large-scale imports of a chip that is still better than anything China's own industry makes at scale. If allowing the export of these less powerful GPUs was a policy mistake that *advantaged* China, then why is *China* the one blocking them? From my perspective, China understands that if they are dependent on American AI hardware - either on the ground in China or accessed remotely via the wide range of southeast Asian clouds (which include SE Asian availability zones from the largest American hyperscalers) - then we have immense leverage over them in any future conflict. Being able to turn off the clouds instantly is actually the greatest leverage. Yes, Chinese AI labs still want Nvidia chips. Gray market prices for H200 servers have roughly tripled over the past year. But that is exactly the point. Beijing is willing to impose real costs on its own AI labs to avoid dependence on American GPUs, which tells you how Beijing views GPU imports: not as a gift, but as a threat to its own ambitions. Maybe, just maybe, selling China GPUs that trail our own state of the art, so that Chinese developers stay “addicted” to American GPUs and China doesn't build an alternative AI hardware ecosystem that we have no control or influence over *and* that China could share over time with our adversaries, was actually a smart, pro-American national defense policy. And letting them access southeast Asian clouds might be an even smarter policy as so easy to turn clouds off. I believed and still believed it was smart policy. And I say this as someone whose posts here are hawkish enough on China that I won't travel there anymore. And note that both the Biden and Trump administration allowed the export of less powerful GPUs to China for all of these reasons. It was only under the Trump administration that China woke up to the risk of what was actually a pretty smart, pro-national defense policy and then China began restricting GPUs. The lesson of the H20 is that a deliberately crippled chip doesn't keep China on our stack. Beijing moved against the H20 and RTX Pro 6000D as it concluded that domestic Chinese chips had caught up to them. So if China develops an alternative AI hardware ecosystem that it shares with Russia, Iran and North Korea, we will look back and think it would have been even smarter to offer China the B30A in 2025 instead of the H200s we eventually approved case-by-case. Especially given the H200 is not the frontier: with Vera Rubin now in full production, it is two generations behind what American labs are buying. All of this is to say that Jensen has been consistently lobbying for a position that was adapted by both the Biden *and* Trump admins *and* looks smarter every month that goes by as Chinese labs increasingly adapt their MoE architectures to domestic Chinese hardware. DeepSeek reportedly gave Huawei and Cambricon early access to V4 instead of Nvidia and AMD, and a Huawei-led team has since post-trained V4-Pro on Ascend chips. And if America *ever* falls behind China in AI, the China hawks here in America who helped accelerate the creation of this alternative Chinese AI hardware ecosystem will deserve a significant share of the blame.

My old college town has banned superintelligence. Ignoring the practical issues, just think what it would mean for Indiana University scholars and students to be denied cutting-edge computational capabilities. It is a restriction on the freedom to study and learn.

SITUATION DETECTED: Bloomington, Indiana's city council voted unanimously this week to ban any recursively self-improving entity capable of greatly outperforming all humans on all cognitive tasks from inside city limits, citing existential hazards and loss of human control.

Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now

Scott Galloway calls Elon Musk a "traitor to the West" and invokes the executions of the Rosenbergs after WW2. "We lined up the Rosenbergs against a wall. This is a traitor to the West, and he should be held to the same standards as every other traitor in the West." *Applause* These people are absolutely unhinged.

Elon Is Doing It Again: SpaceX Will Be The World’s Biggest AI Cloud Making 13GW in 1.5 Years A Reality newsletter.semianalysis.com/…

Thank you Uncle Bill, for all that you did for the world, and for me. breakthroughjournal.org/p/th…

Robert and I are thrilled that our gift of over 2 million shares of SpaceX stock will be distributed to children’s Trump accounts in December!   Our initial gift (shares transferring to escrow as we speak) will go to 11 to 17-year-olds who live in zip codes with median family income (MFI) of $57,000 or less, and to those who live in zip codes with too few residents for an MFI to be reported in the census. These families should receive a notice by Monday.    In a few weeks, an additional gift will be finalized for eligible 11 to 17-year-old children in military families serving overseas, children in foster care, and more children whose MFI is $90,000 or less living in counties near our home in the great state of Texas.   Thank you to the incredible team @SpaceX, @Treasury, @IRS, @DellFdn, @GreaterHorizons, @InvestAmerica24, and the legal firms of Morgan Lewis and Gibson Dunn for working over the past few months to make this happen.   We are deeply grateful for the groundbreaking work that Brad Gerstner @altcap and @MichaelDell have done for the long-term financial security for millions of kids.   God Bless America!

The Knowledge Problem in Public Health In 1945, economist Friedrich Hayek identified a fundamental weakness in centralized economic planning: the knowledge necessary to make sound decisions is dispersed throughout society. No central authority, however intelligent or well-intentioned, can fully possess the information held by millions of individuals responding to their particular circumstances. The same problem arises in public health. Knowledge about disease, clinical outcomes, patient behavior, environmental conditions, and local vulnerabilities is distributed among physicians, patients, scientists, laboratories, hospitals, and communities. National public health institutions contribute essential scientific expertise and coordination, but they cannot possess all the knowledge required to determine the optimal intervention for every population under every circumstance. Centralization creates an additional danger. When a mistaken scientific assumption is implemented independently in one community, its consequences may be limited, and the experience of other communities may expose the error. When that same assumption is embedded in a uniform national policy, the resulting error can become systemic. The institutional mechanisms that ordinarily permit discovery through variation, comparison, and correction may be weakened precisely when they are most needed. This suggests a fundamental principle of public health governance: "the greater the uncertainty surrounding an intervention, the greater the value of preserving independent investigation, local adaptation, and opportunities for comparative learning." This principle does not eliminate the need for national coordination. Infectious diseases cross jurisdictional boundaries, and reliable surveillance, scientific standards, and emergency resource mobilization require collective action. Rather, it argues for distinguishing coordination from uniformity. A national public health system should coordinate the acquisition and exchange of knowledge without unnecessarily requiring identical decisions wherever legitimate uncertainty exists. The objective should not be fifty independent public health systems operating in isolation, nor one centralized system making every consequential decision. It should be a scientifically integrated but operationally adaptive system that preserves institutional diversity, measures outcomes, identifies errors early, and rapidly incorporates new knowledge. The greatest danger is not simply that a public health authority may be wrong. All scientific institutions are sometimes wrong. The greater danger is constructing a system in which one institution's error becomes everyone's error, while the mechanisms needed to discover that error have been suppressed.

Scott Galloway says Tesla is the patient in Musk's SpaceX merger and SpaceX shareholders are the organ donors "It's a real merger with a fake promise. When Musk merges something into another, it's an acknowledgement that it's about to crater." "He stuffed Twitter into xAI, which then got folded into SpaceX. His M&A strategy is simple. When one of his kids is failing, he makes another family adopt it." "So, right now, Tesla is the patient and SpaceX is the organ donor or SpaceX shareholders are the organ donor." "So, who wins? Tesla shareholders... That's like trading, you know, your Buick for a piece of a Gulfstream."

INVESTIGATE ELON MUSK.

Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!

The older you get the more you realize that politics are psychology: the vast majority of people believe what they do as an extension of their ingrained personalities. They don’t reason from first principles, or adjust policy based on data: they’re woke lefties or tradcons or AI doomers or accelerationists because the political shoe fits the mental foot. Few ever change sides, and if so only after contact with the results of their politics (and usually not even then). Because to do so wouldn’t be updating an opinion, but changing their entire self, and nobody intentionally casts themselves into that confusing abyss.

I asked Claude how much it would have taken to develop Econvitals pre-coding agents. It's answer: a team of about 50 people working for three years with a budget of $20 million. Is this correct or too high? I'm not sure. econvitals.org/about/before-…