Nvidia, AMD Pay A 15% Bribe To The US Treasury To Keep Selling Chips To China

Failures

from the national-security-violations-are-fine-as-long-as-they're-profitable dept

If you actually pay attention you might notice the right wing’s pearl-clutching over China is neither effective nor consistent.

The GOP, for years, made a giant stink about China’s Huawei network gear being a massive national security threat, and pushed through legislation to tear the inexpensive gear out of U.S. networks. Then just… forgot to fund the efforts, resulting in telecoms on the hook for billions in additional costs. Nobody really seems interested in following up on how that project is even going.

Or you’ll surely recall the great TikTok hyperventilation of 2021-2024, in which the GOP insisted that Chinese-owned TikTok was the greatest propaganda and privacy menace to grace U.S. shores in a generation, resulting in a ban that never happened. In a country where Congress is too corrupt to pass a real privacy law that would apply to all companies, including dodgy data brokers who sell your every daily fart to all manner of equally dodgy folks… including (gasp) global intelligence agencies.

The Trump saber rattling over China is usually driven by a weird combination of xenophobia and greed that usually has nothing to do with national security or the public interest. Initiatives are incoherently proposed and retracted without reason or any logic, repeatedly. None of it is effective or well intentioned in any way, but you’d often be hard pressed to know this reading U.S. press coverage of it.

The latest case in point: after years of hyperventilating about the dangers of doing business with China and crowing about the protection of U.S. AI supremacy, the Trump administration has “allowed” Nvidia and AMD to sell their high-end chipsets to China, if the US government gets a fifteen percent cut of the proceeds:

“The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development.”

Transferring our top end chipsets and AI advantage to China is the worst thing in the world! Unless we get a cut. Then it’s magically all fine! A handful of Democrats, like Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, were quick to highlight how this makes no coherent sense:

“The administration cannot simultaneously treat semiconductor exports as both a national security threat and a revenue opportunity. By putting a price on our security concerns, we signal to China and our allies that American national security principles are negotiable for the right fee.”

But it makes perfect sense if you remember that authoritarian zealots don’t actually believe in much of anything beyond their own wealth and power. Trump despised TikTok until he realized he could get it to buckle to his whims (either by selling to one of his billionaire allies or imposing algorithms more aligned with right wing ideology). All of the national security stuff is theater. None of it is good faith.

Major outlets seem pathologically incentivized to portray all of this as best savvy dealmaking, and at worst some light erraticism. But it’s just self-serving gibberish by an authoritarian man-baby who has no idea how anything works. Outlets like the New York Times can clarify that this hyperactive market intervention is far from traditional “free market Conservativism or Libertarianism,” but they refuse to clearly explain the incoherent fascist corruption of it.

Trump is a bigoted fascist operating at a third-grade reading level whose policies are completely incoherent. He believes in absolutely nothing but attention, wealth and power. The closest the NYT can get to coherently explaining this to readers is to proclaim “this isn’t your grandpa’s Republican party,” despite some obvious, fleeting concerns about any of this being, you know, legal.

Companies that signed up for Trumpism for mindless deregulation and tax cuts are, of course, unsettled by the unpredictable nature of the whole leopard-eating-faces experience they’re now enjoying. But that’s the nature of authoritarianism; you can’t strike any sort of coherent partnership in it, because the only thing an unpredictable authoritarian dullard zealot believes in is their own wealth and power.

Of course, the Trump administration isn’t saying where these new export taxes will actually go. And the costs will, as usual, be passed down to consumers of a chipset market where many major graphics cards are still going for double MSRP thanks to government-sanctioned price gouging.

The administration keeps signaling this incoherent bribery scheme is going to be expanded into other industries. With most of the costs being borne by the folks that can least afford them (small businesses, consumers, workers). Recall Trump has disemboweled all U.S. regulators, so protecting markets and consumers is no longer a thing, something the press also can’t coherently seem to explain to the public).

But again, this is authoritarianism. Companies, voters, and business leaders who signed up for this for some tax cuts and deregulation were warned repeatedly that this would be exponentially worse. And the orchestra is really only just getting warmed up. If you were hoodwinked or complicit with enabling authoritarians, it’s a moral imperative that you now play a major role in dismantling it.

Filed Under: ai, authoritarians, china, chips, chipsets, donald trump, export taxes, hardware, national security, trade war, warhawk
Companies: amd, nvidia