Tech Brew Ride Home - Has China Shut The Door On Nvidia?

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

We talked recently about how Nvidia wasn’t home free in China just yet, and low and behold, they’re stopping H20 chip production over Chinese concerns. Did Elon Musk talk to Mark Zuckerberg about buying OpenAI together? And of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Links: Nvidia Orders Halt to H20 Production After China Directive Against Purchases (The Information) Meta Signs $10 Billion-Plus Cloud Deal With Google (The Information) Elon Musk tried to enlist Mark Zuckerberg in $100bn bid for OpenAI (Financial Times) OpenAI Is Challenging Google—While Using Its Search Data (The Information) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: He Sold His Likeness. Now His Avatar Is Shilling Supplements on TikTok. (NYTimes) Bill Gates meets Willy Wonka: How Epic’s 82-year-old billionaire CEO, Judy Faulkner, built her software factory (CNBC) Mutant Podcast Army Fantasy Football League Link poyeg1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Friday, August 22nd, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. We talked recently about how Nvidia maybe wasn't home-free in China just yet, and lo and behold, they're stopping H20 chip production over Chinese concerns. Did Elon Musk talk to Mark Zuckerberg about buying Open AI together? And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

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and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. College PC. The information is reporting that Nvidia has apparently told suppliers like Amcor and Samsung to halt H20 chip production after China urged local tech firms to avoid using H20 chips over alleged security concerns. We spoke about this a few weeks ago. China worried about chip tracking and chip back doors at the time, and I guess that has come to ahead.

Quote, the production halt signals that despite the Trump administration's decision to allow NVIDIA to resume selling the chips after a months-long ban, the chip giant's hopes of maintaining its foothold in the Chinese market remain in limbo now because of the Chinese government's policies. Chinese authorities fear Nvidia's chips could contain backdoors that funnel sensitive data from China to the U.S. The information previously reported, as a result, Chinese authorities are encouraging local companies to use Chinese-made AI chips, such as those sold by Huawei. NVIDIA sent its communications this week on the H-20 to Arizona-based Amcor technology and South Korea's Samsung Electronics, according to the two people. Amcor handles the advanced

packaging of Nvidia's H20 chips, a process that involves combining multiple components, while Samsung supplies high bandwidth memory chips for the H20. In a statement, NVIDIA said, we constantly manage our supply chain to address market conditions. It added that allowing U.S. chips for beneficial commercial business use is good for everyone. NVIDIA also denied that its chips have backdoors, quote, that would give anyone a remote way to access or control them. The market can use the H20 with confidence, end quote. More on NVIDIA's efforts to calm these Chinese concerns, quoting Fortune. InVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said Friday that the company is discussing a potential new computer chip

designed for China with the Trump administration. Wong was asked about a possible B30A semiconductor for artificial intelligence data centers for China while on a visit to Taiwan where he was meeting Nvidia's key manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, the world's largest chipmaker. I'm offering a new product to China for AI data centers, the follow on to H20, Wong said, but added that that's not our decision to make. It's up to, of course, the United States government, and we're in dialogue with them, but it's too soon to know. The B30A based on California-based NVIDIA's specialized Blackwell technology is reported to operate in about half the speed of

NVIDIA's main B-300 chips, end quote. And quoting the South China Morning Post. Invidia CEO, Jensen Wong, said, Nvidia was surprised. by the doubts from China about the H20, as, quote, they've requested and urged us to secure licenses for the H20 for some time, and I've worked quite hard to help them secure the licenses. Meanwhile, there are growing signs that China may be close to pulling off homegrown AI stacking that could replace Nvidia's products. On Thursday, Chinese artificial intelligence startup deep seek said the country would soon have homegrown next-generation chips for AI stacking, fanning speculation over breakthroughs that may have been achieved. On Friday, Wong reiterated

the company's line that the H20 had no back doors. There's no such thing, and there never has been, Wong told reporters. Shipping H20 to China is not a national security concern. It's great for America, and it is great for the Chinese market, Huang said, adding that demand for the chips from Chinese customers was, quote, quite great. According to industry sources and media reports, China's tech firms have been dissuaded by the country's regulators from purchasing H20 chips. Tencent Holdings President Martin Lau Qing Ping told a conference call last week that the company was taking a weight and sea stance on chip imports, but that it had sufficient inventory to train AI models, end quote. Probably related, China's Shanghai Stock Index hit a decade high

this morning, driven by gains in local chipmakers, CamberCon, and Hygon after this news on Nvidia may be halting H20 production. More from the information who says that meta has signed a deal with Google worth more than $10 billion over $6,000. years to use Google Cloud's servers, storage, networking, and other services. Quote, the deal worth more than $10 billion over six years, the person said, is one of the largest known agreements in Google Cloud's 17-year history. It comes after META CEO Mark Zuckerberg in July said his company would spend hundreds of billions of dollars on expanding its computing capacity to enable its ambitions and

artificial intelligence. Google's deal with meta is the latest example of the search juggernaut's ability to strike cloud deals with even its fiercest competitor. Earlier this year, OpenAI signed a cloud computing agreement with Google, which is investing heavily in AI to rival that of OpenAI. Apple, which owns the chief rival to Google's Android mobile operating system, is one of the biggest customers of Google Cloud, where it stores ICloud customers' data. Landing Meta as a major customer is arguably an even bigger feather in Google's cap. Not only is meta, its biggest digital advertising rival, the companies compete on multiple

other fronts from AI to virtual and augmented reality. They have also found ways to work together in the past, including signing an agreement years ago to beat back advertising technology that was threatening Google's ad brokerage business, according to a Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against Google. The new cloud deal, which also includes access to Nvidia's graphics processing units running in Google's data centers, shows that Google Cloud is able to close deals with large firms, even as it runs a distant third to Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing market. In recent months, Google has won deals from its rivals and attracted AI startups

to its cloud through the performance of its Gemini 2.5 model and other capabilities its competitors don't have. Google Cloud's growth and rising profit margins have powered Google's stock in recent quarters. For years, Meta has run its social media apps and other services using data centers it owns and operates. Earlier this week, the company announced it had opened a new data center in Kansas City, Missouri as part of a $1 billion investment in the state. Over the past few years, though, Meta has also inked deals with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to rent cloud servers and jointly developed PITORCH, a set of AI application development tools created by Meta. Meta also rents cloud servers from Oracle and CoreWeave.

Adding Google Cloud as a provider will make Meta one of the world's biggest cloud customers alongside Apple and OpenAI and could give meta more leverage to negotiate better prices with AWS and Azure and improve its ability to serve users around the world. This multi-cloud approach has been used by software giants like Salesforce, which announced a partnership with Google Cloud in 2017, and it's also a customer of AWS and Azure, end quote. According to a court filing seen by the Financial Times, Elon Musk says he talked to Mark Zuckerberg in February about backing a $97.4 billion open AI takeover bid, but neither he nor metta signed a letter of intent. Quote, any potential partnership between Musk and Zuckerberg

would stand in stark contrast to previous interactions in 2023 when the pair taunted each other online going as far as trying to arrange a physical fight after Zuckerberg launched threads. as a rival to Musk's X. In the court filing, part of Musk's ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI, OpenAI called on the court to compel META to hand over documents related to the communications with Musk. Open AI also noted that META had been spending heavily to develop its own AI capabilities, including offering pay packages of $100 million or more to leading researchers from Open AI and elsewhere. Meta asks the court to deny Open AIs request, noting that meta never joined the bid, end quote. You know how one of the limitations to using chat GPT was that it wasn't good for current events?

Well, sources say OpenAI has been partially using Google search results scraped by a startup called SERP API for chat GPT responses on current events like news and sports. Quoting, geez, the information again. OpenAI is getting the data from SERP API, an eight-year-old web scraping firm, which listed OpenAI as a customer on its website as recently. as May last year. It removed the reference for reasons that couldn't be learned. At the same time, OpenAI has begun to rent cloud servers from Google Cloud to Power Chat-CTPT, suggesting that Google believes it can still benefit from the rise of OpenAI in a way similar to how it forged deep business ties with other longtime rivals such as Apple and meta-platforms. Even so, Google has shown a sensitivity about allowing OpenAI to access its search data directly. A year ago, Google rejected

OpenAI's request to do so to develop search for ChatGPT, according to testimony and email in Google's ongoing antitrust case. Google executives have privately derided SERP API, which is based in Austin, Texas, and tried various techniques to make it harder for the firm to scrape high quality information through its web crawler, said a person with knowledge of the efforts. It isn't clear how successful those efforts have been. Google doesn't appear to have taken legal steps to try to shut down SERP API, an action that might run afoul of Google's terms of service. Due to regulatory scrutiny, Google may be wary of going after competitors who use its search results in its ongoing anti-trusts court battle with the Department of Justice, the judge overseeing the case,

has signaled support for forcing Google to share its search results data with rivals. We retrieve accurate, contextually relevant information from web pages and a variety of providers. This allows us to surface and synthesize information from multiple sources, and OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. A Google spokesperson and SERP API CEO Julian Kalaghi declined to comment. This isn't the first time OpenAI has used Google data to boost its artificial intelligence products. the chat GPT maker previously illicitly used data from YouTube videos to train some of its models, the information reported.

Open AI isn't the only Google rival to use SERP API data. SERP API's website previously listed Apple as a customer. In addition to partnering with Google on search, the iPhone maker develops technology to power searches in Safari, a lucrative deal that the judge overseeing the DOJ case could also nix. SERP API also lists perplexity, which runs an AI search engine as a customer. OpenAI in January estimated it handled at least 25 times more web searches per day than perplexity, according to a government filing. OpenAI doesn't rely entirely on Google search results for its search responses, though.

It uses its own web crawler for obtaining and indexing web data, and it also has gotten data from Microsoft's Bing via an application programming interface, which allows developers to access and use its search results. Other companies, including Brave and Exa, offer similar search APIs, but Google does not because it considers search data one of its crowned. Jules. Opening Eye executives themselves have admitted that it would be extremely difficult for them to replicate Google's level of accuracy on their own when it comes to uncommon search queries, end quote.

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First up, the New York Times took a look at a dude who sold his likeness to AI and now sees his visage all over the internet. Last year, Scott Jokmain, a 52-year-old actor from Dallas, licensed his likeness to TikTok for a one-time payment of $750. Now, his digital clone appears in countless ads, shilling everything from insurance to horoscopes to dubious supplements, often without his knowledge or approval. These avatars created from brief footage filmed by an external agency can speak multiple languages, including fluent Spanish, which Jachman doesn't, and even lacks his signature facial hair

leading to surreal inaccuracies. TikTok's tool allows advertisers, especially small businesses, to select from a menu of digital personas and generate customized videos quickly and cheaply. Companies like American Eagle and Tarzo praise the efficiency. Marketers can A-B-test scripts and presenters en masse, slashing production costs and time. For instance, Tarzo's CEO Yenif Moore noted that one avatar can speak all the languages in the world. American Eagles' CMO, Craig Bromers, described simply recording casual talk, then programming his avatar to deliver any message. However, performers like Jack Main and artist Tracy Fedder, who earned less than $1,000, feel the tradeoffs acutely.

Avatars have appeared on unauthorized platforms like YouTube and Instagram, promoting embarrassing products such as male performance supplements, violations of TikTok's terms that were later removed. Jack Main lamented, quote, you really don't know the ramifications of this, while Fedder viewed it as inevitable, quote, I might as well get paid for it before they decide not to pay anyone, end quote. experts warn of broader implications of all this NYU law professor Gene Fromer highlighted performers limited recourse as contracts lag behind technology, potentially forcing avatars to endorse abhorrent views or low-class goods. Venture capitalist Joe Marchezy predicted brands will prioritize cost savings but risk backlash. As AI advances, some foresee a shift to fully synthetic

personas sidlining human actors altogether. Then, I don't know if you heard the recent acquired episode about this company. But if you didn't, CNBC has a great profile of Epic Systems and its founder, the billionaire Judy Faulkner. Do you ever use that app MyChart to talk to your doctor? Yeah, this is that. Launched in 1979 with just $70,000 from colleagues, Epic now generates $5.7 billion in annual revenue and serves 42% of U.S. acute care hospitals through its electronic health records or EHR software, outpacing rivals like Oracle Health. Faulkner's net worth stands at $7.8 billion from her 43% stake, making her one of Forbes's top billionaires. She vows to keep Epic private, rejecting public markets and acquisitions,

as she believes they prioritize profits over purpose. Born in New Jersey, to a pharmacist father and activist mother, Faulkner discovered her passion for math early and pursued computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her early work on medical computing inspired Epic's focus on reliable user-centric software. The company's 1,670-acre Verona, Wisconsin campus resembles a fantastical theme park with buildings themed after The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, complete with slides, art installations, and an underground auditorium for monthly work church meetings that even include grammar lessons. Epic's Ten Commandments emphasize integrity, forbidding going public or mergers, and prioritizing functional software.

With 14,000 employees and a low 7% turnover rate, Epic fosters loyalty through perks like assigned BFF support for clients and Faulkner's own hands-on involvement. She responds to emails swiftly, apparently, and takes meticulous notes in meetings. Epic Software reaches 325 million patients globally, but critics decry its clunky interface, interoperability barriers and alleged anti-competitive tactics, leading to lawsuits from firms like Particle Health. But looking ahead, Faulkner, aged 82, has a robust succession plan in place. Her voting shares will transfer to a trust overseen by family employees and health care leaders to preserve Epic's independence. Sumit Rana, promoted to president in 2024, is a likely successor at the CEO role, and a giving pledge signatory.

Faulkner donates 99% of her wealth via her Roots and Wings Foundation, supporting low-income families. There are no weekend bonus episodes this weekend, but the last link in the show notes today is to our fantasy soccer league. We do this every year, about 50 of you sign up, and I always forget to name the winner at the end of the season. So if you won last year, get in touch and I'll shout you out. If you win this year, do the same next year. Anyway, it's run through the Premier League fantasy site, and the league is called Mutant Podcast Army. So click through and join up up the arsenal.

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