Better Offline - The Black Market for AI GPUs with Steve Burke

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Steve Burke of GamersNexus to talk about the black market for AI GPUs in China - and how Bloomberg suspiciously forced YouTube to take his video down. Premium Newsletter: AI Bubble 2027 - https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-bubble-2027  GamersNexus:  Our Channel Could Be Deleted (GamersNexus) https://youtu.be/tUnRWh4xOCY?si=AD2hyE6z5-ZiyInW  Mirror of NVIDIA AI GPU Black Market Story - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyWelvEP_CQ https://www.youtube.com/gamersnexushttps://gamersnexus.net/https://bsky.app/profile/gamersnexus.bsky.social https://x.com/GamersNexus YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. BUY A LIMITED EDITION BETTER OFFLINE CHALLENGE COIN! https://cottonbureau.com/p/XSH74N/challenge-coin/better-offline-challenge-coin#/29269226/gold-metal-1.75in --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/  Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting. Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart.

Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you. you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles, so how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with

the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world, like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now.

You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. And of course, you can go into the notes for the episode. You can take a look at links from a newsletter. You can go and buy some merch, as always. But much more importantly, today I'm joined by the esteemed Steve Burke of Gamers Nexus.

Steve, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So you did an incredible. video on the black market smuggling of Nvidia's AI GPs into China. And then there has been a thing that's happened where the video has been pulled down due to a DMCA complaint from Bloomberg.

What is happening? Yeah, it's, so the video, it's really cool video where we went all over China finding these GPUs. As part of that, we included a recap of all the news of export controls where the U.S. controls GPUs that are above a certain performance threshold and the allowance to export those to China by American companies. And so that was the story. We wanted to look into, okay, but they're still getting to China. And so how is that?

And as part of that recap, go through all the news. We've got clips of various politicians. There was a clip of Obama in there. And there was a clip of Trump in there, a couple of them, talking about AI or GPU. export control bands. Of course, AI, I know Ed is one of your favorite topics. My faves, yes. Yes, me as well. And yeah, so we received a copyright strike from a small publication called Bloomberg. Oh, so that strike took the video offline, and now we are currently challenging it. And so the strike was for specifically, I believe it was minutes 22 until minute 2315 in the video. Of Donald Trump speaking, the President of America. Correct. Yes. That is ludicrous. And you went to New York specifically to have it out with them, did they?

Where do we stand as we speak? Because this is going out in about a week from now, it's August 28th. So who knows what, 26th even. Don't know what to happen next. Yeah. If it goes out in about a week, then that'll be pretty close to when we should have an update from YouTube. Because the video is off right now. Correct. The video's gone. And it's very interesting how copyright strikes work because if basically the way it works is a company files a strike, they decide if there's infringement of some kind and they file it. YouTube then basically, especially for a company Bloomberg's size, will automatically approve it. it's then up to the creator to dispute that.

The video is offline during this entire process. Any money from the video is held at least in escrow. And so then you can dispute it if you want. At that stage, YouTube then decides if it's going to accept your dispute. It accepted ours. It's written by a lawyer, so that makes sense. And then they step back and they're like, okay, we're not involved anymore. It's between you guys.

And so the party that filed the claimant, so Bloomberg here, has 10 business days to file proof of lawsuit. So if they submit to YouTube proof that they are suing us, which thus far as we record this, they have not. Then at that stage, YouTube would keep the video offline and they kind of let the two parties resolve them amongst themselves. If they don't submit any proof of a lawsuit or they don't file a lawsuit and then show YouTube that they've done so, again, they haven't at this point.

then basically in 10 business days, the video goes back up. We get fucked over for the 10 days in between, and then the money, in theory, should be released back to us, the ad revenue that was made from it, if it follows that course. But the biggest damage that's done is from the loss of momentum in those total time period, maybe 13 days or so. But why would Bloomberg do this?

Are they really that attached to videos of Donald Trump, or is it something else? I mean, I, yeah, we talked about this in our video where we flew out to try and speak with them. I have a number of theories. We don't know their motive precisely, but, you know, there's a few strange things going on where, first of all, I've noticed that they have not claimed any or struck any that I'm aware of the re-uploads of the video. so that's interesting because there's hundreds of them. It was just ours that went up initially.

Secondly, we have used that clip before, and that hasn't been stricken. And so specifically in this black market video. And yeah, the theories we came up with were there's some competing content from Bloomberg, where they attempted to do what we did. It was really a failed attempt. They tried to find some,

muggled AI GPs in China, as far as they kind of presented it in data centers. They were unable to do so. They couldn't get any access. They filmed sand in the desert. They go home. There's also... Wait, right. That's all they got. Yeah.

They drive around in a desert. They point the camera at some buildings that are being constructed. They say, you know, there's AI GPUs and then they're hills. And then that's about it. It's kind of funny that you appear to, on your own and, with your team, obviously, able to get this access that these large legacy media people don't, which it's meant to be the other way around based on what everyone says. So what is it the makes your approach different to Bloomberg's?

Like, why did you get stuff that they didn't, rather than just the desert? Right. Yeah, well, to be fair, we did not film a desert, so they did have an exclusive there. but I think it comes down to the approach where we looked at it like this is an interesting concept, this idea of black market GPUs, but from my point of view, we approached it as well, let's just see what are the people involved in this chain think and do they think it's a black market or do they just think it's a market? And a lot of the people we worked with were just, I think, amused at the concept of being involved in the media process and wanted to see how it works.

And so, honestly, I think a lot of that access, especially to the people who are just sort of like normal people, they're not these big, you know, executives at some huge corporation. They're middlemen and their people transacting GPUs on the ground. I think for them, if you go into it without this presupposition of some kind of particular I don't know, leaning or ethics of whether what they're doing is or isn't okay or whatever. Or even expecting what you'll find in advance. Exactly. Yeah.

I think if you go in with an open mind of like, we're just going to hang out with this guy for a day and just observe his job. People are, you know, they're pretty happy to share that. So, yeah. How did you actually start, though? So you came up with the idea that you wanted to see how illicit GPUs. making it into China. Did you have contacts in China or Hong Kong and so on that you talk to in advance? And they kind of said, oh, if you come here, we can show you this. What was the process? Yeah, the process was really cool. We're still kind of learning how to iterate on this.

But each time we're, the big thing we learned this time for this investigation was really just trying to that first contact matters a lot and being able to work with that first person we find to then find their contacts and kind of follow the chain down the line and so the first guy we found is a professor at the chinese university of hong kong he buys and uses these high-on gpues uh in servers for educational purposes and research purposes and as soon as we made contact with him, we were able to work with someone who, first of all, speaks, you know, native level excellent English, so that certainly helped. And then secondly, who has a lot of local knowledge and contacts. And I think a lot of it is just kind of knowing which, in our case,

which link in the chain you need next to make the story makes sense. So in his case, he's a user of these GPUs. So next we need is some kind of supplier, you know, and then we need their supplier. Yeah. So what, it's all quite complex. I did watch the video and it was, what, three hours or so or more, even? It was truly wonderful. And so what exactly are the GPUs that are restricted? Was it just AI GPUs? Was it like consumer level ones as well? What is exactly being handed around? It's both. So on the high-end, side, there's some smuggling and presence of these data center class GPUs. So that'd be things like H-100s, Hopper 100s, A-100s. We actually physically saw several of those and things like that.

On the consumer side, there aren't as many restricted consumer GPUs, but there are a few. So the RTX 5090 is one of them that has 32 gigabytes of video memory. so that's very valuable for these use cases. The RTX-4090 actually is another one, and that one's kind of amusing because it's so easily. And that's a consumer GPU, right? Yes, consumer GPU, yeah. And last gen, consumer GPU at that.

But it's easily modified to carry double the video memory as the actual official NVIDIA spec and the skew. So they can increase it from 20, to 48 gigabytes of memory, which is extremely valuable for these training and LLM-type tasks where it may be a last gen, so it's technically a little bit slower. But if you can fit it in memory, you can still run it, versus if you can't fit it in memory the model, you may not be able to run it at all. And so those are the consumer cards.

The 49y, though, is interesting because one of the guys we spoke to who is effectively a buyer and seller of these band to GPUs. He was asking me on camera, he was seeking confirmation of, well, but is, are you sure the 5090s band? Yeah. And I said, yeah, I'm sure here it is on the list. And he was so confused because he said, but they're just all over the market next door. We walk over there. And there's dozens of them. So. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman,

help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. The worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard,

you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

humor me I need some jokes to make me seem funny Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Heart to get started. That's 844-8-4-Ehart. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles.

I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety, I started living in my car and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill. And it's hard to be present.

We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety. and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations

about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30.

You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not.

During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. They're practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's so strange as well because it doesn't seem like you basically walked off the plane and had a price sheet. From just a guy, like it wasn't clear how you got the price sheet exactly, and perhaps you can't say, but it was just, yeah, these things are banned other than the fact we have just like guys who sell them literally everywhere.

Yeah. And how are they getting in? So there's a couple ways. One of the ones that we showed in the video is really interesting. So the very end of the process, we actually, this is one of the reasons we delayed initial publication. we were able to, with help of a viewer, locate someone you could actually classify as a smuggler in the U.S. So someone from China in the U.S., and he buys GPUs from people in the U.S., he drives people in the U.S., he drives around all over, and buys mostly 49ies, which are in high demand in China. And then he'll strip those down so that could be removing the cooler.

I don't think this particular guy desoders them. I've heard stories of some people desoldering GPUs and mailing them. That would reduce your shipping cost a lot, increase your margin. But he buys the 4090s, ships the boards back. His profits about $300 U.S. per board before taxes. It wasn't 100% clear if he does or doesn't pay taxes. And then at that point, once they are either shipped into Hong Kong or Macau, Macau directly if they feel gutsy enough or indirectly through a third country, a middle

country where there is no export control. Then they arrive and they get redistributed from there. They're sometimes hand carried as well by students, international students who just fly back with a 59, they bought it Best Buy or something and they can double their money roughly if they're lucky. That's so wack. It's wacky that there is such a big black market, but I guess the export bands just created it, as did this whole AI, this crazed AI moment.

Did, in fact, while you were over in Hong Kong, did you actually go to China? I can't remember, or was it just in Hong? So did you, this is an anecdotal thing. How was the pressure of AI there? How big was the conversation, the advertisement? Did you see it on the same level? It's funny if you didn't. I'm just curious.

I saw it more in Taiwan, which we went to as well. So, yeah, after the China trip, we went over to Taiwan. And I don't think it made it into the cut, but we shot a short clip of just a bus, like a public bus, with a gigantic AI, the laptop advertisement on it. So I would say it's kind of at least there, it's similar to what you see here where it's, you know, if you're anywhere in the vicinity of a Best Buy or a city that has technology dealers, then you're going to see AI ads. In China, yeah, yeah. saw it in the tech markets for sure, some banners, but it's just, I don't know, that's, I only understand Chinese if I'm actively trying to understand it, you know, so it's, I think a lot of that gets filtered out for me. Right. Yeah, I assume you speak some,

you seem to speak some Chinese. I can't speak anything but English, so I could not correct your Chinese at all. You do speak more proper English than I do, though, so I'll give you that. Yeah, yeah, I speak all kinds of it these days. It's not going well. People criticize my accent all the time. So as far as how the government sets these limits, one thing he did really eloquently towards the beginning of the video as well was he kind of went through how arbitrary the limits seem to be and how invidia seems very capable of adapting around them to the point that it almost doesn't make sense. Yeah. Yeah, they've modified the regulations a few times and it's so this particular part. I don't really blame NVIDIA for for this, which is just trying to, you know, the government sets some regulations and a company says, okay, we'll comply with these, and then they comply

with them, and then the government kind of says, no, wait, not like that. Yeah, that's very standard for pretty much all regulation. Like, it may be, it's good or bad, what have you, but it's not, it happens all the time with companies. Yes, and in this case, one of the things that has, uh, the, I guess AI world developed and the applications. One of the things that changed was this understanding that memory capacity is basically the most important aspect of it.

And the initial versions of the formula didn't consider memory in any scenario. From what I remember, it was based on the marketed flops of performance on the spec sheet multiplied against the bit length of the operation or something like that. They later added memory bandwidth. Memory capacity though is still, as far as I'm aware, right now is still not considered in the formula. Yeah, it feels just arbitrary, but I imagine also it's quite difficult to find a way to do this, especially when the people setting the regulation might not have the best handle on computers. Yeah, I think the best way to do this would probably be if they wanted to, and I don't have a particular one way or the other, but if they wanted to control it, I think the best way is probably some kind of benchmark or set of benchmarks, just like you would do for a review, where you say, okay, if it exceeds some performance threshold in this real world use case or multiple of them in aggregate, then it's export controlled.

but instead they just kind of calculate based on the spec sheet and the companies that make these things obviously you know full appropriate credit to nvdia the company is extremely confident with making GPUs they know what they're doing and um they're going to know a lot more about how to tweak those dials to comply uh than a government agency will so so on the subject of invidia knowing things

do you think that do they seem aware of any of this, like any of, any of this smuggling happening? Do they seem to, did you get any comment out of them? We asked a lot of the people in the chain what their perception was of NVIDIA's awareness. And so the professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, he had a great answer when I asked them, do you think NVIDIA knows? And he kind of, he paused for a second.

And then he said, well, how could they not? You know, how like these things are very excited. expensive. You've got 30 plus $1,000 GPUs, and it just seems like they would all be tracked. What was the term? There was a specific term as well for like, kind of like basically equivalent of ignoring him. Yeah, so the Chinese is done EGN, B-E-G-N, which means open one eye, close one eye, or turn a blind eye, is the idiot. Yeah. That's awesome. It's just very cool. Yeah, it's super. I mean, the coolest part about that was multiple people said that exact idiom. And it's just, it's such a specific choice of words. It'd be the same as if you asked like three people a question.

You know, they all said, oh, they turn a blind eye. At some point, you're like, okay, this seems to be a real, like, consistent belief here. but yeah I think from NVIDIA's standpoint it's whether or not they want to actually control what gets in it's hard to say certainly from a pure financial standpoint the more GPs they sell the more money they make they probably don't really care who they sell them to as long as they sell them to someone and then where they end up after that I mean maybe to the extent that NVIDIA doesn't want to piss off the United States government they you know they try to to comply as much as they reasonably can, but how much do they actually try to control ingress into a country that's export control? It's hard to say. But certainly I think they are aware of this happening. I just, I have a really hard time believing that they are unaware their GPs are making it into China when they shouldn't be. And I imagine it must be quite hard to stop. Like, I hate to have any sympathy for Envidio, but it does feel like something that would be, kind of a moving target because one thing that was consistent across the whole video was the ingenuity

of the people involved. It does make, you see like American entrepreneurs sometimes and they're like, oh yeah, it's tough to, you know, the hours are very tough and, you know, I was coding all night. And all of these guys were just like, yeah, I've got a thing in the back of my car full of wires. Yeah. I've got, I have a whole rig. Yeah, it's great. And that is, I mean, again, You know, from that particular side of things, I don't suspect, I mean, look, it's a government regulation. And if the government wants to regulate it, it's kind of up to them. Obviously, the companies need to comply with it. But I wouldn't expect a company, even Nvidia, to send in any kind of enforcement.

Maybe what they would do is if they wanted to enforce it, you know, they might identify, okay, this purchaser, there's evidence of this purchaser exporting to China anyway and so we're just going to stop selling to them or something but that's kind of I think the most you might expect of them but yeah as far as the ingenuity it was pretty crazy like the guy in the US who buys the cards he um he just got a Prius with a massive like battery bank in the back like a UPS with a lithium mine battery in it he's got a test bench hooked up to it an ATX test bench pops the trunk open. He's got a spare license plate in the trunk for some reason. I don't know why. That's not to ask. That's not to ask. Yeah, don't need to know. And yeah, if you want to sell him your card, you're just some American who found him on Facebook marketplace.

He at the time we were talking with him. He was paying $2,000 flat. He makes $300 when he sells it. And you bring him the card, meet him wherever. He tests it. and in the back of the, you know, in the trunk of the car, he just runs a benchmark, make sure it's good, and buys it, ships it back, or carries it back, depending on how secure he feels. And then also to your point of ingenuity, the shops that are capable of modifying cards where they're just, they're repair shops, and they just happen to be really good at board level BGA or Ball Grid Array device repair or swap. It's they can pull memory modules, they can add memory modules, swap the GPU between PCBs,

and they're able to keep silicon in service where, you know, they're just a repair shop. So it's kind of like from their perspective, look, they're not doing anything illegal in China. They're just keeping boards in service. But for people who need these high capacity GPUs for AI tasks and they happen to be export controlled, a shop like this would be capable of taking a card that has dyed, you know, through, use or just needs to be upfit to be better and they can do that for pretty cheap and basically in a couple hours. And it's not illegal to sell them in China once they're there, right? They've like that is not a crime like China is not prosecuting people for any of this.

Correct. It is not illegal to own or sell these GPUs or buy them in China. It's illegal. If you are an American company, if you're NVIDIA or your Best Buy or a partner or whatever, it would be illegal to sell the export controlled cards to a company or an entity or person in China. But once it's there, yeah, there's no real control over it. The only place that we found that China steps in is if there's some kind of undeclared ingress through port. So, like, for example, there were CPUs and GPs at various points in the last several years that were smuggled in with crates of live lobsters or in prosthetic baby bombs. But was that real? Was the lobsta thing real?

The lobster thing was real, despite what Unvitea said. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, Help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group.

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle. Just one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind. when it struggles. I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience.

We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life.

What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30. You shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health.

These are real honest conversations. we don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas.

Their practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hell yeah. I love the... So actually, describe the full lobster situation. I think everyone will want to hear about the lobster.

Yes, so the lobster situation, as it were, is... Basically, there was a Hong Kong port, so customs intercepted a white van. I think it was there's like a customs post. They post photos of the things that they are able to snipe being brought in and properly. So Hong Kong's a free trade port, but there's still certain declarations you have to make, and sometimes people won't make those. And so there was a van bringing in crates of undeclared live lobsters driving on it. I think it was the Macau or the Juhai Bridge or something.

But anyway, they got intercepted. And alongside the live lobsters were GPUs, and they were older. I think they were quadros, but they were brought, all being brought in improperly. And, yeah, so customs post the thing. They're like, we found this, you know, and I think that's just kind of like the, here's us doing our job and maybe scare people off or whatever. And then later, AI startup Anthropic released a statement talking about how there needed to be more strictly enforced export control in the U.S.

And they mentioned smuggling of GPUs with lobsters. NVIDIA responded, I don't have their statement in front of me right now, but it was something along the lines of it would be better if American, you know, AI companies would focus on innovation rather than the part I do remember was tell tall tales of prosthetic baby bump smuggling or GPUs sensitive electronics being smuggled with live lobsters. Turns out that is not a tall tail. That is a thing that happened. This is the thing. People say Jensen Huang is cool. If you're cool, you say, yeah, our chips, like we don't like this happening. This is bad. We're doing everything. We can't stop it.

But yeah, they're doing James Bond shit to get our GPUs. Like, come on. You could just say that. They do seem a little sensitive, and we're recording this the day before their earnings, and I've got no idea what's going to happen. No one does. Everyone's a bit worried about it. So I think the China market is going to get extremely interesting because they've got the H20 ban, but now the H20 ban has been lifted, and now we're in this weird spot where, I don't know if you've heard anything about this yourself, where there are suggestions that the Chinese government

is actively saying not to buy Nvidia GPUs. Have you heard anything about that? Yes. So the Chinese government, I believe it's called the cyberspace. It might be a security agency or something like that.

But one of their government agencies put out a statement following a separate statement from a state-owned or at least state-controlled in some capacity media report where the statement said or at least floated the possibility that NVIDIA's H20s may have some form of spyware in them.

And so the suggestions were tracking or government backdoors. And so that was kind of the accusation. NVIDIA, of course, posted a statement saying, absolutely not. This is not a thing. And, you know, just to be fair here, there's not currently, as far as we're aware of, any firm evidence of this. but I'm also sure that governments know things about products from other nations that we would never know anyway, so who knows. But that's where it stood. Envidia said we don't have these.

China's agency said to companies in China that they should be wary of using H20s and advised against purchasing them for fear of some kind of backdoor or spyware. So how realistic would it be for – I actually did you hear any scuttle about it. around this of switch into Huawei chips or something. We did ask, yeah, I think we might have only kept one of those questions in the actual video, but I did ask a lot of people. Huawei, from the user's perspectives, the people we spoke to, none of the people we spoke to are using Huawei components right now. So they're getting more powerful from what I understand.

I think there's a few hurdles. One of them is it's kind of the same reason where the companies aren't even really using AMD and they've been doing this for a while, whereas Huawei is pretty new. And a lot of that comes down to CUDA, where Nvidia is the proprietor of CUDA, which is a library they can use to accelerate tasks in which a lot of software is written to use. I mean, even just rendering a video. It's the coding language to get. Accelerate Computing, right?

Correct, yeah. Specifically on Nvidia GPUs, though. Yes, it specifically works on Nvidia and nothing else. And so AMD would have to use, I don't know, OpenCL or something else. Depending on, like for video encoding, you'd maybe use OpenCL. But that's the biggest limitation where a lot of the sort of so-called AI tasks are reliant on Kuda to operate at any reasonable speed. And so until there's a big push to move away from that, it's NVIDIA GPUs all the way down. And maybe the push is export control.

Maybe the groups in China that need a higher volume of GPUs than they're able to easily get eventually say, okay, let's just put all of our resources on trying to use OpenCL or use something out of PyTorch or whatever. So that may be the direction it goes. Yeah, it just feel, it does actually feel like Cuda is the thing that needs to be broken here. For better or for worse, I'm just saying that there's a lot of talk about, oh, making more powerful chips here and there with AMD or Huawei. But it feels like Cuda really is the thing that they actually need to change. And I guess the probably explaining to the markets what Cuda is is difficult enough. But it feels that if they could move past Cuda, that would be the actual thing that would do it.

Yeah, it's kind of like the X-86 situation where, Getting off of x86. And just for the listeners, what do you mean about that? Yeah, so your average computer is very likely an x86 computer, which is a specific micro architecture that has to do with how software runs and interacts with the hardware and the other software on the system. And so it's kind of like a prerequisite for you might have an application that requires Windows to be compatible. and this is another one of those types of foundational prerequisites. Okay, X-86, as opposed to, for example, Arm. And Arm laptops made kind of a splash a while ago

because they were trying to basically assert that, hey, look, we can run stuff that typically would only run on an old X-86 microarchitecture, and now we can run it on Arm. And so that is something where Intel, an AMD, although mostly Intel, have a vested interest in keeping everything on X-86, and likewise, Envidia has an interest in keeping things on Kuda.

From an end-user standpoint, there are benefits to this where Kuda, for me, for rendering a video, it just works better than something else. Right. Right. And so it's kind of, it is a chicken or the egg problem where it's kind of like,

well, okay, you know, on one hand, you don't want a company to develop a monopoly only because there's some kind of anti-competitive practice that's keeping them in place. On the other hand, you don't want to punish a company either for inventing something that's just better. And the problem we run into with software

is the developers need to choose what to support, and a lot of times they choose Nvidia and maybe not something else because if you have limited resources, you're going to go with what 90% of the market has. It's kind of a self-fulfilling. It's a feedback loop, basically. So to expand it to something

like Huawei, they would have to break that kuda. I don't know if you want to call it a moat or something like that, or a walled garden, I guess either one of those, or a walled garden with a moat around it. But they would have to break that down to really become more viable and increase their performance. So before we go, did you catch any Blackwell out there or any signs that Blackwell would even make it out there? Yeah.

So in addition to the 5090s, which are Blackwell, as far as like the high-end server stuff, we did work with so there's two companies we worked with here one of them we physically visited in Taiwan and there's another one we were talking to in Singapore and what we learned is that there is some intermediary basically

pass-throughs that can happen through for example a Taiwanese testing agency where a Chinese company might ask them to purchase Blackwell servers or high-end hopper servers and bring them into Taiwan under their company, perform testing or pre-testing on them, assembly, whatever packaging.

Whether it's a facade or not, basically the stated purpose is make sure it all works. And then once it does, forward that shipment to their customer, the Taiwanese company's customer in China. And so that would allow them to potentially get into China. And so in that situation, yeah, We were shown a room filled with, for example, G.B. or Grace Blackwell servers that were being tested and prepped.

Yeah, well, I'm going to, I think we should wrap it there, Steve. So the status of the video right now as we record this is it's offline. But by the time this goes live, you know, in September the 3rd, it will go up. Hopefully it's back on. Where can people support you? gamers nexus just the YouTube channel is the best place to go and yeah hopefully it's back up within should be within a couple days of you posting this unless Bloomberg submits a files a lawsuit in which case they'll hear about you everyone will hear about it oh and they'll hear about it from me as well this is utter bullshit

what Bloomberg is doing it's ridiculous but you have been listening to better offline I'm Ed Zittron Steve thank you so much for joining us and yeah we're going to do something in a couple months as well but always a pleasure to having you man thank you right thanks so much thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is mattosowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski dot com m-a-t-t-t-o-s-o-w-sk-i dot com you can email me at easy at better offline or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed.at to visit the Discord and go to our slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smygle and Friends.

Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your... Podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world.

Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out.

There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be able to. be out of that phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts

or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down. Orsha accusing Kelly of sleeping with a merry man. They hold and Kay Michelle back from fighting Drew. Pinky

financial issues. On the podcast, Reality with the King, I, Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real House Wise franchise, the drama, the alliances, M&T, everybody's talking about.

To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed Human.