Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/15 – Nvidia Back In Business In China?

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Has the US government suddenly allowed Nvidia back in business in China? A segment wherein I make the case the GW’s are the new metric that matters to the tech industry, over and above anything else. Windsurf finds a permanent home. And is China already producing the smartglasses Zuck wants to see next? Links: Nvidia, AMD to Resume AI Chip Sales to China in US Reversal (Bloomberg) Apple to Buy Rare Earths From Pentagon-Backed US Producer MP (Bloomberg) Zuckerberg Says Meta Will Build Gigawatt-Size Data Centers (Bloomberg) Meta’s New Superintelligence Lab Is Discussing Major A.I. Strategy Changes (NYTimes) Cognition AI Buys Windsurf as A.I. Frenzy Escalates (NYTimes) China’s AI glasses market takes shape as Xiaomi’s entry inspires early adopters (SCMP) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMe right home for Tuesday, July 15th. 2025, I'm Brian McCullough. Today has the U.S. government suddenly allowed Nvidia back in business in China.

A segment wherein I make the case that gigawatts are the new metric that matters most to the tech industry over and above everything else. Windsurf finds a permanent home and is China already producing the smart glasses Zuck wants to see next. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. NVIDIA says it plans to resume H20 AI chip sales to China after the U.S. assured its shipments of those chips will be approved, thereby reversing an earlier Trump administration stance from back in April. Quoting Bloomberg, U.S. government officials told NVIDIA they would greenlight export licenses for its H20 artificial intelligence accelerator, the company said in a blog post on Monday, a move that may add billions to NVIDIA's revenue this year, restoring its ability to fulfill orders it had written off as lost. due to government restrictions. NVIDIA designed the less advanced H20 chip to comply with earlier China trade curbs from Washington, which Trump's team tightened in April to block H20 sales to the Asian country without a U.S.

permit. AMD received similar assurances from the U.S. Commerce Department and plans to restart shipments of its MI308 chips to China. Once licenses for sales are approved, the company said in a statement Tuesday, shares of AMD jumped as much as 8.5 percent after markets open. in New York, while Nvidia rose as much as 5%. NVIDIA chief executive officer Jensen Huang, who met with President Donald Trump last week and is currently in Beijing attending a government-sponsored conference, appeared on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV shortly after NVIDIA announced the decision, saying the company had

secured approval to begin shipping. The Commerce Department, which oversees U.S. export controls on chips and the tools used to make them, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the agency has already issued any H-20 licenses. The U.S. move, after weeks of thawing relations between Washington and Beijing, guided by an opaque trade truce that's designed to see both sides approve exports of crucial technologies. After meeting his Chinese counterpart last week, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there's a, quote, strong desire on both sides for a meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping later this year. Washington, in recent weeks, has lifted a spate of export controls, including on-chip design software,

imposed ahead of last month's talks in London. That's in return for China allowing more sales of rare earth minerals needed to make a range of high-tech products, something U.S. negotiators thought they'd achieved the month prior during talks in Geneva. Throughout and after those negotiations, Trump's team insisted that controls on NVIDIA's H-20 chips were not up for discussion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged Tuesday that the restrictions on NVIDIA's H-20 chips were part of the London talks, despite his own earlier assertions, that there was no such quid pro quo, tying semiconductors and rare earths, end quote. Again, I want to underline this isn't just Nvidia that is benefiting from this change,

reportedly. AMD said, as mentioned, it will restart its shipments of MI308 AI chips to China after receiving similar assurances from the U.S. Department of Commerce. But who knows with these things? The U.S. Commerce Department this morning apparently opened national security probes into imports of unmanned aircraft systems, so read drones, and polysilicon supply chains used in chip manufacturing. So would China be pissed if their drone industry is hit and would then come back on something else, which would then reverberate back to chips? Who knows? Obviously related. Apple says it has signed a $500 million deal to buy rare earth minerals from U.S. producer MP, which apparently secured some sort of Pentagon backing last week.

This is obviously an attempt by Apple to cut its reliance on China for some rare earth minerals, quoting Bloomberg. The two companies will build a factory in Texas with neodymium magnet manufacturing lines tailored for Apple products, the iPhone maker said Tuesday in a statement. Apple said the spending on rare earth minerals is part of its earlier pledge to invest more than $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years. The world's dependence on China for rare earth permanent magnets that are essential for consumer tech, cars, wind turbines, and fighter aircraft have become a flashpoint in the Asian nation's trade war with the U.S. after the Trump administration imposed 145 percent tariffs on China, boasting that it had the upper hand. Beijing

turned the tables by essentially shutting down exports of the critical component. MP Materials operates the sole U.S. rare earth mine at Mountain Pass in California. The increased production will support dozens of new manufacturing and R&D jobs, Apple said. The two companies will also work together to establish a rare earth recycling line in Mountain Pass, California, and develop novel magnet materials and innovative processing technologies to enhance magnet performance, according to the statement. That facility will allow MP materials to take in recycled rare earth feedstock and use it in Apple products.

Magnet shipments from the MP Materials facility in Fort Worth, Texas are expected to begin in 27 and ramp up to support hundreds of millions of Apple devices, the Las Vegas-based firm said. China curves have reverberated across global supply chains. Ford and Suzuki idled some automobile production. Elon Musk said shortages were hurting his robotics business and governments rushed to secure the few suppliers outside of China, end quote. Meanwhile, Google has signed two. 20-year power purchase agreements worth $3 billion to access hydroelectric power from Brookfield's

renewables arm. It will deliver up to 670 megawatts of power when up and running. Coreweave says it plans to invest up to $6 billion to set up a 100-magawatt data center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, creating 175 jobs and potentially expanding to 300 megawatts in the future. Are you sensing a trend here? Megawatts are the new metrics that can move markets. Mark Zuckerberg says META is building several multi-gigawatt clusters, starting with one called Prometheus, a massive data center that is scheduled to come online in 2026. Again, moving from megawatts to gigawatts, quoting Bloomberg. Zuckerberg on Monday described the data centers under development as multi-gigawatt clusters,

which would rank among the largest in the world. Meta is building its biggest facility in Richland Parish, Louisiana, which the Facebook co-founder has touted as being nearly the size of Manhattan. While most data centers today house only hundreds of megawatts of capacity apiece, several AI and major technology companies like OpenAI and Oracle are involved in plans to develop facilities capable of handling several gigawatts, or roughly enough energy to power nearly 900,000 homes annually, according to Carbon Collective. That scale of power is seen as necessary to achieve superintelligence in his post.

analysis firm semi-analysis for saying Meta is on track to be the first with a supercluster that houses more than a gigawatt of capacity. In his post on Monday, Zuckerberg reaffirmed that the company is going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into data center capacity to build superintelligence. We have the capital from our business to do this, he wrote, end quote. And related to that, sources are telling the times that Meta's new superintelligence lab, led by Alexander Wang, has discussed abandoning its top open-source mom behemoth in favor of developing a close model. Quote, for years, Meta has chosen to open source its AI models, which means it makes

the computer code public for other developers to build on. Close models keep their underlying code private. Meta executives have long argued it is better for the technology to be built in public so that AI development will move faster and be accessible to more developers. Any move toward a closed AI model would be a philosophical change at Meta as much as a technical one. Meta has won Plotids from developers for open sourcing its AI models and one of its top AI executives, Jan Lacoon, had said, quote, the platform that will win will be the open one. This year, the Chinese AI company Deepseek released an advanced AI chatbot thanks in part

to Meta's open source code. Meta had finished feeding in data to improve its behemoth model, a process known as training, but has delayed its release because of poor internal performance, said the people with knowledge of the matter, who were not authorized to discuss private conversations. After the company announced the formation of the superintelligence lab last month, teams working on the behemoth model, which is known as a frontier model, stopped running new tests on it, one of the people said. The superintelligence lab's discussions are preliminary and no decisions haven't made on potential changes, which would need sign up from Mark Zuckerberg, meta's chief executive. Meta could keep its open source AI models while prioritizing a close model

at the same time. If these scenarios happen, they will be a significant shift for the company as it tries to stay competitive in the AI race against rivals like Google, Open AI, and Anthropic. A meta spokesman declined to comment on the superintelligence labs discussions. In a podcast interview last year, Mark Zuckerberg said, we're obviously very pro-open source, but I haven't committed to releasing every single thing we do. On Tuesday, Mr. Wang held a question and answer session with Meta's AI workers, who number about 2000. In the meeting, he said the work of his small team would be private,

but Meta's entire AI division would now be working toward creating superintelligence, the people with knowledge of the matter said. He did not address whether AI models would be open or closed. In August, at the end of the company's next vesting period, which is when some workers are able to sell portions of their stock, some employees expect an exodus of AI talent who were not chosen to join Mr. Wang's superintelligence team, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said, end quote. If yesterday's show title was Google Snatch's WinSurf from Open AI, then this segment's title could be cognition snatches windsurf from Google. Quoting the times. Cognition AI, an artificial intelligence startup that offers a software coding assistant said on Monday that it had bought rival

windsurf as part of an escalating battle to lead in the technology. The move follows a $2.4 billion deal by Google to acquire some of Winsurf's top executives and licensed the startup's technology, which was revealed on Friday. Google's deal appeared to leave Winsurf in a difficult position as a standalone startup. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT's chatbot, had also been in talks to buy WinSurf before the Google deal. The price of the deal could not be immediately learned. Over the weekend, WinSurf's founders, who said they would leave the company as part of Google's investment, were criticized after it appeared some of their employees would not see similar paydays as colleagues who were leaving to join Google. Cognition, which offers an AI coding assistant

called Devin to help software developers create programs, said its deal would allow all windsurf employees to participate in financial gain, according to a letter sent to WinSurf employees. WinSurf employees with equity will receive an accelerated vesting schedule, which means their stock can be cashed in earlier than anticipated, according to the letter. Those who do not have stock in the company will also be given vested shares based on their time working at the company. After the Google deal was announced, WinSurf executives worked over the weekend to structure

a sale to Cognition. Two people familiar with the discussion said, Winsurf had multiple suitors, the people said, but cognition offered the strongest terms and a deal that would provide bigger benefits to all employees, end quote. Startup ecosystem heads up. According to Pitchbook, U.S. startup funding surged 75.6% year-on-year in the first half of this year, 2025, to $162.8 billion, the strongest since the first half of 2021. This has largely been driven by, you guessed it, AI investing excitement, but it does put us on track for the second best year ever, in terms of VC investment. There is a twist, though, quoting the Economic Times. AI has emerged as a strong magnet for venture capital in 2025, attracting a substantial 53% of all global VC funding in the first half of the year. The latest data from Pitchbook shows this figure

is even higher at 64% for U.S.-based companies. While the numbers suggest that the AI investment wave is far from slowing, market observers have cautioned over the increasing concentration of capital in a small group of companies, largely American. For instance, in Q2, over one-third of all U.S. venture dollars were allocated to just five firms, end quote. Yes, deals like the huge Miramirati thinking machines raise and the safe superintelligence Ilya Susquever raise, but Q2 2025 was the second strongest quarter for startup mergers and acquisitions also since 2021 with $50 billion in exit value. So the land grab and AI is churning up the M&A action, which is maybe the most healthy thing you can be looking to see if you're a startup.

Finally, today is China about to leap ahead of the West when it comes to the dream of AR smart glasses. The South China Morning Post turned me on to the Xiaomi AI glasses launched in China on June 26, with a starting price of around $278 U.S. dollars featuring a 12-machixel ultra-wide camera and powered by Qualcomm's AR-1 chip. It's got a battery that lasts 8.6 hours. but what I found interesting was the ecosystem that might be necessary to help a product like this succeed. Quote, the Xiaomi AI glasses were handy for hands-free photography and videography, which was ideal for situations like cycling, where the user's hands were occupied, according to a Singapore media industry worker surnamed Lee.

I cycled in the Ha Tongs when I was in Beijing recently, and all I had to do was tell Zhao AI to start recording, and it conveniently started filming the ride. Lee told the post last week. The Xiaomi AI eyewear's image and video capture quality was among the best in China, thanks to the company's experience and edge in developing smartphone imaging systems. Another user added, the company's Siri-like AI assistant Zhao AI could be tapped for a range of AI-powered tasks, such as simultaneous translation of 10 languages and recording and transcribing conference calls,

which had proved useful for office collaboration, according to Lee. Lee tried other AI glasses, including the famed Rayban meta glasses, which were also capable of photo and video shooting, but Xiaomi's integration of the Zhao AI assistant and its interconnectivity with other Xiaomi products helped it stand out from other AI eyewear, he said. Welsh and XR analyst He Wong Chang said that Xiaomi's main strength in the smart glasses market would be its large ecosystem, which includes a range of smart home appliances and electric vehicles. Lao Jian-based AI entrepreneur said he was able to use the Xiaomi frames to control other Xiaomi products, a function he found to be convenient and helpful. I have a lot of Xiaomi smart gadgets, so if you are an avid

Xiaomi user, then the Xiaomi AI glasses will surprise you, Lo said. Counterpoint analyst Ivan Lamb said that Xiaomi's supply chain strength positioned it well, compared with other Chinese AI eyewear makers in the race to grab a slice of the market, the product ecosystem and the integration of its supply chain are Xiaomi's advantages, Lam said. Still, Xiaomi AI, eyewear's early adopters are hopeful that the future generations of the product will look more like regular pairs of glasses. Lau said the device currently looked more like a tech gadget trying to pass itself off as

eyewear. Everyone who glances at it will notice it's not a normal pair of glasses, and that's the biggest issue, he said, end quote. Interesting. If Zuck beats Apple to true smart glasses, is it still advantage Apple? because they have experience integrating with smart home ecosystems. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.