The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - China Decode: China's Renewable Energy Dominance in the AI Race

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In this episode of China Decode, hosts Alice Han and James Kynge unpack how the U.S. and China are building the backbone of the AI era — massive data centers that are reshaping global energy use and government policy. They look at who’s paying for the AI boom, why electricity might decide the winner, and how China’s homegrown models are quietly catching up to Silicon Valley. Then, China’s newest aircraft carrier, and why it’s raising questions about Beijing’s military ambitions and the U.S. strategy in the Pacific. And finally — flying taxis might actually be here. Alice and James take to the skies with EHang’s new pilotless air taxi and what it says about China’s appetite for futuristic tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this show comes from the Audible original, The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine. Quantum computers, the next great frontier of technology, offering endless possibilities that stretch the human mind. But for Roscoe Cudulian and the Phoenix Colony, quantum computing uploads the human mind with life-altering consequences. Audibles hit sci-fi thriller The Downloaded returns with Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, reprising his role as Rosco Cudulian in The Downloaded 2, Ghosts in the Machine. This thought-provoking sequel from Robert J. Sawyer takes listeners on a captivating sci-fi journey, a mind-bending must-listen that asks, what are you willing to lose to save the ones you love?

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helping you get to where you need to be from season kickoff to the championships. It's inside these data centers that the machines that train artificial intelligence actually work. Without big data centers, you can't train your AI algorithms to get better and better. And data centers, as you mentioned, are really power hungry. And they also need a lot of air conditioning and they need a lot of water. And so the race between the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence, to a large extent, comes down to these data centers. Welcome to China Decode. I'm Alice Han. And I'm James King. In today's episode of China Decode,

we are discussing the buildout of AI data centers, how the U.S. and China are taking different approaches, the Chinese Navy's debut of a new aircraft carrier and what that means for tensions in the region, and the dream of flying taxis, it might. be closer than you think. Where are you today, Alice? Well, I am in Sicily, and this is actually going to amuse you, James. I just came back from climbing Mount Etna, so talk about dancing on a volcano, and hopefully you can't hear the wailing sirens on the street.

It's fairly noisy here. I'll keep an ear out for them as the podcast goes on. Thanks, James. All right, James, let's get straight into it. In this great race, it's developing over capable AI tools, both China and the U.S., are building out massive data centers. Generative AI models lean on a massive amount of powerful GPUs, which need both a lot of electricity to perform and a great deal of water to stay cool. So given the high cost and the vast energy implications of these data centers,

let's talk a little bit about how these things are getting paid for and getting power in both the Chinese and the American context. So James, I think, you know, now that we've turned the page on the trade conflict, and it seems that we're back into a dayton period, what struck me over the last week as being quite interesting was the Jensen Huang Bees and the FT, where you used to work, in which he says that China is quote-unquote nanoseconds behind America in the AI race, primarily because electricity generation is so much more abundant in China and a great deal cheaper. And so he, I think, has issued a clarin call within the American context to showcase to Americans that China actually has some tools in its toolkit

in this broader AI competition. And, you know, I would love to get into the minutiae of it in terms of the comparison. But what struck me as interesting is the fact that the U.S. and when you look at CAPEX cycle is clearly orders of magnitude ahead, not only in terms of just raw CAPEX that we've seen by the big tech companies, the big AI frontier labs and the tech companies. But also in the fact that you have, from a policy standpoint, the U.S. Stargate project, which is $500 billion, deployed over four years, I think the Chinese equivalent Stargate, which was announced by Alibaba this year, is only $53 billion over three years. But I think this is going to incite a reaction from China, probably in the next March NPC when the five-year plan is unveiled, to really, I think, increase the amount of expenditure for data centers. And again, as I alluded to, China is a country that leads in power generation. It basically produces 10,000 terawatts per hour in terms of energy.

That's more than double what the US produces. But certainly it has, as we've talked about in previous podcast episodes, a semiconductor disadvantage in the sense that it doesn't have access to the energy-efficient cutting-edge, leading-edge semiconductors that are produced, say, for instance, by NVIDIA. But James, what's your take on that? this AI competition that is ballooning? Well, as you say, Ellis, I think the key point is around these data centers, because it's in data centers, you know, which you wouldn't really look twice at. I mean, they're sort of big square buildings on the side of the road. But it's inside these

data centers that the machines that train artificial intelligence models actually work. And so without big data centers, you can't train your AI algorithms. You can't train your AI algorithms to get better and better. So that's the key aspect of why data centers are important. And data centers, as you mentioned, are really power hungry. And they also need a lot of air conditioning and they need a lot of water. And so the race between the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence to a large extent comes down to these data centers. And as you said at the beginning, I think it's really interesting that Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, said this month that he thought that China will win the AI race. Then he slightly backpedaled

and said, oh, well, China's only nanoseconds behind. But I think this allows us to really look into the constituent parts of who is likely to win the AI race, because, of course, the stakes are enormous. AI is going to power all kinds of applications. It's going to power all kinds of technologies and it already is. So the question of who wins is really crucial to the technology economy. Now, as you mentioned, Alice, each country has different assets. The first thing to be said is that at the moment the U.S. is way ahead in terms of the number of data centers it has. The U.S. has got well over 5,000 data centers as things stand. And China, according to statistics that I've been able to find has only about 450. But this might not stay that way, and we also

need to look at the cost structures involved. The remarkable thing about China's data centers is where they're located. They tend to be in the deserts in the far north of China. Some of them are in a desert called the Taclamakan, which actually I've been to. I went through it on a bus. I wish I could say I went on a camel, but on a bus it took four days to cross. And the name of the Taklama Khan actually means if you go in, you never come out. And it is one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The temperature is often nudging 50 degrees Celsius, about 120 degrees Fahrenheit. But the reason it's there, and the reason that China's putting so many of these data centers in deserts

is because the sun beats down and the power for these data centers is generated by. solar panels. And the power that China is generating through these solar panels is actually the cheapest power anywhere in the world. It costs about two cents, two US cents per kilowatt hour. Just to give an example, that is about one-fifth of the cheapest cost of electricity generated in the UK through coal. So China's got this natural advantage in terms of building data centers in the desert. But it also has a couple of other strategies, one of which is big subsidies by the government, subsidies in terms of the energy bills that the data centers have to pay. The government is subsidizing that so that it means that a lot of these data centers in China

are paying just half of what you would normally pay for the data centers. And the other big advantage that China has is called superclusters. I won't go into this in great detail, but just suffice it to say that the U.S. is far ahead when it comes to the power of individual computer chips. So the Blackwell chip is far more powerful than anything that China has. But China is perfecting a way of putting lots and lots of its own indigenous chips, mostly made by Huawei, into what's called a supercluster. Some of these superclusters have like 380 chips in them, but China wants to go much, much bigger than that.

It wants to have a super cluster of more than 8,000 chips. And so it hopes that it can increase the compute power by using many, many more chips. So I think that's the contours of the competition that we see. What are you hearing, Alice? I mean, do you think China can make it, or do you think the US is just in an unassailable? lead? So the way that I think about this is that if you recall during the Biden administration,

there were a great amount of export controls in Chinese chips, or rather Chinese imports of chips coming out of America and elsewhere. And the consensus at the time was that China is screwed. China will not be able to find an option. AI will severely be impaired in terms of its development in China as a result of this hardware constraint. That consensus has shifted a great deal. And I sense that the consensus around AI has also shifted in the sense that people no longer think that China is down and out. China has, as you allude to and reference, James, its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. The way that I think about the future is that whereas a lot of the Internet revolution was about bites, I think in some respects we're returning to the world of atoms.

And China has been very good at indigenizing and securitizing its energy supply. chains. As I referenced, it is the world's biggest producer of electricity, and it has even more projects that it's going to bring online, like the hydroelectric dam in Tibet, which could put even more energy on the grid. I think that this is something that people are starting to realize is an important aspect, this energy aspect in the AI competition. It's not just about chips. It's not just about, you know, the trillions of CAPEX that the US seems to be dedicating over the next few years in terms of KAPX outlays for AI data centers. It's also about energy production and energy efficiency. So on the production front, China is leading in energy. On the efficiency front,

as you allude to James, there's interesting ways in which they can cluster. But even the tech companies themselves, when they design their LLMs, which we could get into, they are designing more energy efficient LLMs that, in theory, could lead to an 82% drop in the number of Nvidia GPUs that they would require to power the AI models. And so just to give people a sense of the numbers, what would normally take 1,192 GPUs, apparently the researchers at Alibaba are able to do with just 213 Nvidia H20 GPUs. That's the difference between spending $2.5 million on NVIDIA GPUs and spending way over $14 million. And again, if you think about it from an energy perspective, the power savings could also be massive as well. So I think there's an interesting

thing that's happening on the energy production front and the energy efficiency front that I think people are starting to cotton onto. Yeah, I mean, I think we kind of got to bring it back to why Jensen Huang is saying that China will win. And I think a lot of the reasons are the ones you just cited, plus the fact that China has gone for an open source model in all of these large language models that it's coming out with. So as of October, nine of the 10 top open source artificial intelligence models are Chinese. This is in contrast to many of the American models, such as OpenAI, chat GPT, which is not open source. So China's going really quite a different route from the US. China's going cheap power, superclusters of semiconductors, fewer data centers,

but probably cheaper, cheaper to build, and then trying to make the artificial intelligence models that it brings out open source so that a lot of companies in China can then start to build their applications based on those models and start to make money by deploying AI in the economy. I think that's China's approach. It still doesn't quite explain to me why Jensen Huang would say that he thinks China will win. Because if you look at the U.S., they've got better chips, far more powerful chips, and they've got many more data centers to train the AI models. So I don't know.

I don't know which side of this I come down on, actually, tell you the truth, Alice. I think the U.S. is a formidable competitor. Yeah, I still agree. It's too early to tell. And as we've been saying in previous podcasts, China's going to be. to do AI with Chinese characteristics. No doubt about it. It's going to do it in a way that's quite different from the US. And as we were talking about in previous episodes, the US is chasing AGI areas that might be more compute intensive, whereas China is not just making energy cheap

in the support of AI models, but it's also making models cheap. I mean, I was looking at some of the numbers. The deep seek chat model, the cost per million output tokens is only a dollar in 10. Q1 plus from Alibaba, it's a dollar in 20. And for reference, GPT-5 from Open AI, it's $10. Claude Sonnet from Anthropic. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is $15. So they are making these LLMs cheapers along with energy. And I think with massive implications when we think about the AI competition,

in many ways they are competing for different things, is my conclusion. Okay, we'll be back with more after a quick break. So stay with us. the show comes from Upwork. You're the CEO of your business, you're also the CFO and the IT department and customer service. It's time to find some support. Upwork Business Plus helps you bring in top quality freelancers fast. It gives you instant access to the top 1% of talent on Upwork and fields such as marketing, design, AI, and more. All ready to jump in and take work off your plate. Upwork Business Plus takes the hassle out of hiring by dropping trusted freelancers right in

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machine. The Earth only has a few days left. Rosco Cudulian and the rest of the Phoenix colony have to re-upload their minds into the quantum computer, but a new threat has arisen that could destroy their stored consciousness forever. Listen to Oscar winner Brendan Fraser reprised his role as Rosco Cudulian in this follow-up to the Audible Original Blockbuster, The Downloaded. It's a thought-provoking sci-fi journey where identity, memory, and morality collide. Robert J. Sawyer does it again with this much-anticipated sequel that leaves you asking, What are you willing to lose to save the ones you love?

The Downloaded 2. Ghosts in the Machine. Available now, only from Audible. Welcome back. Last week, China revealed that it had commissioned a massive new aircraft carrier, the Fujian, and it's the first one that it designed and built all by itself. This comes a short time after Chinese President Xi Jinping's massive military parade in September for the 80th anniversary, which drew a lot of attention on how recent advancements in homegrown Chinese hardware have raised the capabilities of China's military,

inching closer to parity with the U.S. James, you're more of an expert in this area, so I really want to listen to what you have to say. But I was actually in Beijing during the week of the military parade. And what was interesting not only was the patriotism around it, but the fact that China really was, so to speak, bringing out the big guns, It was showing a new nuclear triad in terms of equipment, military drones, new ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, you name it.

But it was very clear to me watching this, that this was a big sign to Washington and the region that China had key deterrence capabilities when it comes to its military hardware and equipment. James, you're very close to this. How big of a deal is this Fujian carry, and what does it mean for China's broader military goal? I think it's a big deal because it helps us to kind of understand the military balance between the US and China. There's no question that China is catching up the US. And this is part of a bigger topic of the geopolitics between the two superpowers. And it particularly relates to potential theatres of warfare. I use the word potential underlined and stressed

because I'm not predicting any kind of a conflagration between the U.S. and China, but let's say around Taiwan, also the South China Sea, and there are other areas where the U.S. and China kind of contest each other already in a geopolitical sense. So the emergence of China's third aircraft carrier, which, as you mentioned, was designed and built entirely by China, that is important. The big picture for China is that China wants to build what it calls a modernized military force by 2035, so that's 10 years from now, and it wants to build what it calls a world-class military force by 2050, and what people understand by the words world-class means that by that time it hopes to be able to take on the US if it needs to. As things stand, purely in terms of aircraft carriers, China is a long way behind the US. Now that China has three aircraft carriers, the US has 11, so China has the second largest number of aircraft carriers of any country in the world, but clearly it's still far behind.

And I think it's true to say that the technology of the US carriers is far superior to those in China. for instance, the U.S. carriers are nuclear-powered, whereas the Chinese carriers at the moment all run on diesel. And, of course, nuclear power is much more self-sustaining than diesel. However, when we look at other aspects of the military balance, you know, China is already a formidable competitor. The Chinese Navy is now far larger than that of the U.S. They're projected to have about 50% more ships than the U.S. by 2030. So already, I think, we can't sort of underestimate what China can do in terms of military projection. Just coming back to this aircraft carrier

itself, I mean, it's absolutely enormous. It's more than 300 meters long. I mean, the scale of these things is just incredible. That means it can carry about 60 aircraft, and it cost well over six billion U.S. dollars to make. So, you know, it's a pretty amazing thing, I must say. What did you think when you saw pictures of this carrier, Alice? Well, firstly, I mean, they definitely were putting their best foot forward. Everything that came out on the parade was extremely, extremely impressive. But at the end of the day, you know, these images are Potemican villages in a way. They're not battled tested and battle ready. And that I think has been the enduring concern about the PLA's capabilities. It's why,

thing to have cutting-edge equipment and parity with the US, but it's another thing to have the battle experience that say Russia is having in Ukraine. And I think that one of the big concerns for Xi Jinping, especially after the Russia-Ukraine conflict emerged, is whether or not the PLA has the ability and battle readiness to take a stance on Taiwan to either launch an amphibious assault or salami slice it through a quarantine and blockade. And I'm not so sure. And people have different views on whether or not these military equipment are designed to deter the U.S. from aggression in the Asia Pacific or to help launch Xi Jinping's ambitions when it comes to what he would call a reunification of China, taking Taiwan into the fault. But when I think about this, I think a lot

about both capabilities and intentions. And it's not clear to me, especially after the military perjures that we saw at the fourth plenum, whether or not Xi Jinping feels that he is ready for prime time when it comes to using these carriers for a Taiwan showdown. Yeah, I mean, you know, the whole question of Taiwan and whether or not China would make a move to try to retake Taiwan is one of those things that China experts spend a long time thinking about and talking about and, you know, everybody has their own opinion. There really is no evidence. That's why you find such a diversity of opinion among people of our trade, Alice. But my own take on this is, that China wants to build up a military that is so forbiddingly huge that the U.S. would think twice

or think more than twice about ever taking China on in any kind of a military theater. And my sense on Taiwan particularly is that China would very much like to reabsorb Taiwan without fighting. It knows that if it was to launch a military adventure against Taiwan, there would be catastrophic consequences for the global economy, and that would include China. So I think its aim is probably to build up its military force by showing off new hardware, such as this huge new aircraft carrier, such as the military parade in Beijing that you mentioned, and then hope that everybody is kind of cowed and overawed, and Taiwan meekly returns to the motherland at some point in the future. That's my sort of summary.

of what I think China's aiming at. Well, when you were talking, I was thinking of two things. The first is the fact that this aircraft carrier is run on diesel, not nuclear. The U.S. is still at the state of supremacy when it comes to nuclear-powered submarines and operational nuclear warheads. The figure is quite stunning. China has 600 operational nuclear warheads, and you compare to that U.S. with well over 5,000. The U.S. is leading.

In fact, I think the second largest stockpile is held by Russia. That gives you a sense of how much China needs to do to catch up. It's projected they'll reach 1,000 warheads China by 2030. It's stockpile of ICBMs, the intercontinental ballistic missiles, is roughly on parity with the U.S.'s. But there are certain key areas, and I've heard from military experts in the realm of submarine technology, especially where China is a great degree behind the U.S. But the second point I wanted to make, to quote, my boss and mental or Neil Ferguson, he has this law called Ferguson's law in which any country that spends

more on debt servicing rather than the military as throughout history has been on a downturn trajectory. It loses its superpower status. And the U.S. hit that threshold a few years ago. I think that that is quite material when we think about the superpower struggle between China and the U.S. China is increasing its military spending, massively ramping up its military arsenal at a time when the U.S. is doing it in the opposite direction. That's, I think, quite material when we think about the future of U.S. China in the region. Oh, that's great. I hadn't heard of Ferguson's law before. I really like that. I guess the problem with China is, though, that China keeps its military spending deeply secret. I mean, it does come out with figures,

but nobody trusts them. So we don't really know whether China is spending more or less on debt servicing than on its military. So... It's a very fair point. But that's a very fair point. But that's That's a great metric. I really like that. Yeah. And we'll have to see in the March NPC what they say, because every year in the March NPC and the government work report, they will issue a statement about how much they want to increase military spending by. To your point, James, there's so much of this is smoking mirrors. We don't know what is actually being spent and where it's being spent. And I think Ukraine is a great example of the fact that money isn't everything. You've got to be able to tactically deploy it

well and spend it on the right things and use, for instance, drones in an operational manner. Ukrainians have been very lean but very successful. So that's something to keep in mind as well. Well, let's take a quick break, so stay with us. Hi, this is Bella Freud. Each week on fashion neurosis, I invite guests from the world of fashion, art, sport, music and literature to lie on my couch and explore the connection. between fashion and identity. This week on the show, I welcome the presenter and model, Alexa Chang. To me, it's now funny to dress in a more kind of kinky way

because I think I'm more associated with like dungarees and smock tops and a slightly more sexless tombish vibe. Find fashion neurosis on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. When you imagine the future, if you imagine flying around in a car-sized flying vessel, then much of the 21st century must have been very, very disappointing to you. As flying cars, I mean, I watch back to the future. I don't know if you have James, but they have proved still very much elusive. That is until now, perhaps. The company, Iang, based in Guangzhou, China, says it has developed a flying air taxi. It is battery powered and completely autonomous. It flies without,

a pilot inside. E. Hung says it plans to deploy these unmanned EVTOLs, that stands for electric vertical takeoff and landing, it's a mouthful, between airports and some cities in China within three years. And they say that flights will be offered cheap, only 200 to 300 yuan, or about the equivalent of 30 to 40 US dollars. James, when I came across the story, thanks to you, I was very much surprised. Is this for real or is it all hype?

Well, it's definitely for real. I've been following these guys for a few years, actually. But I must say, Alice, when it comes to this kind of thing, I'm personally a complete wimp. You know, I have a friend, for instance, who has a helicopter. He's been badgering me for years to get into it. And I've only ever caved in once. I'm kind of terrified by these things personally. But I'm really interested in Ehang and, as you say, the EVTOL. It sort of looks a bit like a doodle bug. You know, it's got a small cabin, enough room for maybe two people, and then it's got these drone-like rotor blades that sort of spin round. And the really scary aspect of these EVTOLs is that they're autonomously driven. So there is no pilot. So you're sitting there and you're completely at the mercy of the AI algorithm that takes you from A to B. And I must say, I would find that very scary indeed.

I have been in autonomously driven cars. I was in one in Shenzhen last year. I was slightly nervous about that, but it was totally fine. Getting into like an oversized drone and sitting in it and trusting this thing to take you from A to B without crashing, to me is a totally different kettle of fish. But as you say, this has got a license now from the Chinese authorities, and they reckon that they're going to be working commercially

within about three years. And given that these types of projections in China are always padded out, they normally happen quicker than is projected. I reckon, you know, we could be seeing these vehicles in use a couple of years from now, maybe, in certain areas,

you know, not in general use, but in certain areas. And I'm very interested to read that Morgan Stanley, the Investment Bank, reckons that the market for these vehicles, these EVTOLs, could reach about a trillion U.S. dollars by 2040 and even 9 trillion by 2050. So obviously, Morgan Stanley is impressed. They reckon that this is going to become a big part of the way we get around. So maybe it will happen. The last thing I'd say is that China's clearly imbibed this. They've clearly decided that this is going to be something that the future revolves around. And they've come up with a name for this type of technology. They call it

the low altitude economy. So maybe the low altitude economy is going to be a big deal. Yeah. When I first saw the image of this, I just thought this looks like a giant version of a drone and something that I'd imagine Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible to sit into. Hopefully that it doesn't get tapped into by an enemy agent. But it seems very futuristic. And it points to the fact that I think people in China are so ready for tech adoption. I think a lot more daring when it comes to these newfangled technologies. My, I guess, concern would be, as you go into different air spaces, what are going to be the rules of the road and how are you going to regulate this?

I think the government is happy for this to be another way in which Chinese manufacturing capacity can be exported to the rest of the world in the future. But I think technology is moving as often is the case much more quickly than the regulation can keep up or even regulation. regulators can conceive of regulating it. So it's not clear to me how Chinese local governments or the central government will think about regulating this space when it really becomes viable. But I was reading that one of these taxi vehicles that I hung is rolling at can fly over 100 miles on a single charge. And it's taken a cumulative 40,000 flights in 19 countries to date.

So it seems viable for now, but it's going to be interesting to see how this unveils in China as, you know, adoption becomes more widespread. But I haven't seen anything. I don't know if you have James in the U.S. context that's comparable. I don't think they have truly autonomous flying cars. Have you heard of this? Yeah, this is what I was just about to say. I spent a bit of time Googling various countries in Europe and the U.S. to see whether or not they've got a licensing process for these EVTOL. and I couldn't find any, but the fact, as you mentioned, that Ehang has had flights in 19 different countries to date suggests to me that they're trying to convince the authorities, no doubt in Europe and the US and elsewhere, that this is a viable technology, that these flying vehicles are not just going to drop from the sky. And so maybe they will prevail in certain areas

and maybe they'll be licensed in other countries as well. I guess it's all a matter of safety, really. If Ehang can prove that these are safe, then, well, why not, you know? Yeah, this is definitely going to change the way that we move around. I wonder what the first use cases will be if it's people doing this for fun, or if they're actually using it to commute, or if they're using it to send packages. I think it'll be really interesting to see how they quickly commercialize this, and so it's definitely watch this space.

But at least I think they should change the name because it's a mouthful, E-V-T-O-L as an acronym, so we're going to have to find a different one. You're definitely right there. Okay, James, it is prediction time. What's your prediction for the future as you look into your crystal ball? Okay, well, I'm going to stay with the low-altitude economy. I'm not talking about these flying taxis. I'm talking now about drones because the other thing that's happening in China in the low-altitude economy is that the drone,

is that the drone delivery market is really taking off, excuse the pun, and it looks like this year maybe there could be more than 5 million packages delivered by drone in China. That would be up from 2.7 million packages delivered last year. The important thing about this is that, as I'm sure you're aware, Alice, the key thing about delivering packages is that it's quite costly. in what they call the last mile. So, you know, the last stage of the delivery process

where the delivery person has to find your house and then post your package through your letterbox or if you're not there or you don't have a letterbox, do something else. That's the costly bit of delivery. So having a drone that can literally come to your front door and just drop the package on your doorstep is going to be a lot cheaper.

And that's why we're seeing such a big up. in the drone delivery market in China. So my prediction is five million packages delivered this year in China by drone. It sounds like we're going to have a lot of drone over capacity. There's going to be drones everywhere. So James, my prediction is more left field and it's centered in France where the French fraud watchdog has suspended Sheen from operating in France. Now, sheen, as many will recall, is China's fast fashion retailer platform. And apparently it seems, that on the Sheen platform, there were illegal sales of these sex dolls that resembled children. These listings have been taken off of Sheen, as Sheen has confirmed this.

But I think this is symptomatic of a larger issue that is rising between the EU and China, which centers around trade and technology. Whereas in previous episodes, we discussed a great deal of tension between Washington and Beijing. I think what we are starting to see is more storm clouds emerging between Brussels and China. My own sense in talking to people from Europe is that they were very unhappy with the way in which China had basically used the rare earth export controls, even though China has since walked that back. And I think that that move engendered a great deal of mistrust from the policymakers in Europe.

So my sense is that there's going to be more investigations in the next few months on Chinese goods, not just the ones that they've listed, for instance, on Chinese tires. And there may be more, I think, sanctions on Chinese companies in Europe. In addition to what we're seeing with Nick Spiria, for instance, the Chinese semiconductor company based in the Netherlands. This, I think, is a tide that is ultimately symptomatic of worsening trade relations between Europe and China. A very interesting call. I have a hunch that you're right about that. I think that Europe may well get a bit tougher. All right. That's all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to China Decode.

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