Now we have to re-evaluate all his statements in favor of selling to China. For example, we want China to build on "our stack". On the face of it, that seems correct. If China has multiple stacks to pick from why wouldn't we want them to pick our stack? But do they have such a choice?
He has been openly advocating to selling to China.
As CEO of a company that sells GPUS, it seems like the more people he's able to sell to the better.
As have most. Some, like Tesla and Apple, even have factories there!!!
Apple has connections so great that United even introduced a whole airport leg SFO-PVG just for them (unless it's an urban legend).
I think this was SF to Chengdu. From: https://www.reddit.com/r/whoathatsinteresting/comments/1tspz...
From the book: Apple in China
I was curious, so I researched it (aka prompted ChatGPT). SFO-PVG was established in 2000, long before Apple offshored all of their manufacturing to China. An article from the time describes it being something that was in demand among Silicon Valley in general[1] rather than Apple particularly. In 2019, United revealed that Apple does spend $35 million/yr on that single route, averaging 50 seats/day[2], so I suppose that's the source of the legend.
[1]https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/shanghai-to-s-f-flig...
[2]https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/11/apple-united-airline-pu...
Another is the pretense of overcoming Chinese resistance. China sent a cute spy to bang the CEO of Nvidia, but they simultaneously set a "strict limit" on import of Nvidia chips. How does that make sense? It makes sense if the purpose of the "strict limit" is so that any sale of H200 to China can be seen as overcoming Chinese restrictions. Anything that is against the Chinese government's resistance must be good for the US, right?
It could be that they wanted design information and other details from him, and were going to use those to build up domestic manufacturing alongside import restrictions.
It's hard to say from the outside what the goals would be - pushing him in certain directions, extracting intel, etc.
> It could be that they wanted design information and other details from him
For this it would be much easier if the Chinese spies banged Nvidia engineers.
More likely that she was given devices to plant / message him zero day PDFs or whatever.
China also opens up visa free for many countries now, on the other hand, raising requirements for longer stays (work permits, green cards).