the Unpacked Podcast

What's really going on behind AI, tech & market news? A Mandarin podcast from Taiwan by @bryanwang1998 × Charles. 🎙️ New episode every 15th 🎧 Listen 👇

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

Honestly, this isn't the time for Americans to go nuclear on each other. It's time to come together as a country.

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@JensenHuang, we'd love to invite you to build your next company in Taiwan, like Morris Chang did with @TSMC.

Taiwan offers:
- A world-class AI supply chain
- Top engineering talent
- A culture that celebrates engineers
- Speed from idea to reality

Build the next giant here!

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

These discussions are insane, but we'd be more than delighted to see them actually happen:

- @JensenHuang joins @SpaceX
- @SpaceX merges with @Tesla

If both of them happen, $SPCX is way too cheap right now. It should skyrocket. LFGGGG 🚀

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@farzyness Same playbook as FSD. It's all about the data flywheel. More robots in the real world means more data, better models, and, eventually, better robots.

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

Like we said before, neither @AnthropicAI nor @OpenAI can afford to fail. If either one goes down, it takes the whole AI industry with it, so betting on both makes sense. https://t.co/VP3Z5fDj1E

[Wall St Engine @wallstengine]

TSMC will buy up to $500M of Anthropic shares at its IPO price and up to $500M of OpenAI preferred stock.

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

The US needs to figure this out fast. We're stuck in a rabbit hole debating whether to ban AI and data centers, while China is building them at breakneck speed. https://t.co/1sDJp0WhEi

[SemiAnalysis @SemiAnalysis_]

We visited Galaxy, Envision's 800MW wind-powered datacenter campus in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. Its first 120MW phase went from bare land to delivery within a year. (1/6)🧵

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

Most export-control debates miss this: Beijing is leaving H200s stuck in Hong Kong. We think China won't live under a chokehold, so homegrown accelerators aren't optional. https://t.co/6pZBq4gUHS

[Gavin Baker @GavinSBaker]

Something that merits more discussion amongst those who believe it was a mistake by both the Biden and Trump administrations to allow the export of less powerful GPUs to China:

Since the summer of 2025, it has increasingly been *China*, not just DC, blocking Nvidia GPUs in China. Within weeks of Secretary Lutnick saying the goal was to get Chinese developers "addicted" to the American technology stack, Beijing began pressuring its tech giants to stop buying the H20. Then it ordered them to stop buying the RTX Pro 6000D, sent customs teams to the ports to crack down on Nvidia chip imports, and barred foreign AI chips from new state-funded data centers. And as of last week, Reuters reports that roughly 600,000 H200s are sitting in Hong Kong because Beijing won't approve large-scale imports of a chip that is still better than anything China's own industry makes at scale.

If allowing the export of these less powerful GPUs was a policy mistake that *advantaged* China, then why is *China* the one blocking them?

From my perspective, China understands that if they are dependent on American AI hardware - either on the ground in China or accessed remotely via the wide range of southeast Asian clouds (which include SE Asian availability zones from the largest American hyperscalers) - then we have immense leverage over them in any future conflict. Being able to turn off the clouds instantly is actually the greatest leverage.

Yes, Chinese AI labs still want Nvidia chips. Gray market prices for H200 servers have roughly tripled over the past year. But that is exactly the point. Beijing is willing to impose real costs on its own AI labs to avoid dependence on American GPUs, which tells you how Beijing views GPU imports: not as a gift, but as a threat to its own ambitions.

Maybe, just maybe, selling China GPUs that trail our own state of the art, so that Chinese developers stay “addicted” to American GPUs and China doesn't build an alternative AI hardware ecosystem that we have no control or influence over *and* that China could share over time with our adversaries, was actually a smart, pro-American national defense policy. And letting them access southeast Asian clouds might be an even smarter policy as so easy to turn clouds off.

I believed and still believed it was smart policy. And I say this as someone whose posts here are hawkish enough on China that I won't travel there anymore.

And note that both the Biden and Trump administration allowed the export of less powerful GPUs to China for all of these reasons. It was only under the Trump administration that China woke up to the risk of what was actually a pretty smart, pro-national defense policy and then China began restricting GPUs.

The lesson of the H20 is that a deliberately crippled chip doesn't keep China on our stack. Beijing moved against the H20 and RTX Pro 6000D as it concluded that domestic Chinese chips had caught up to them. So if China develops an alternative AI hardware ecosystem that it shares with Russia, Iran and North Korea, we will look back and think it would have been even smarter to offer China the B30A in 2025 instead of the H200s we eventually approved case-by-case. Especially given the H200 is not the frontier: with Vera Rubin now in full production, it is two generations behind what American labs are buying.

All of this is to say that Jensen has been consistently lobbying for a position that was adapted by both the Biden *and* Trump admins *and* looks smarter every month that goes by as Chinese labs increasingly adapt their MoE architectures to domestic Chinese hardware. DeepSeek reportedly gave Huawei and Cambricon early access to V4 instead of Nvidia and AMD, and a Huawei-led team has since post-trained V4-Pro on Ascend chips.

And if America *ever* falls behind China in AI, the China hawks here in America who helped accelerate the creation of this alternative Chinese AI hardware ecosystem will deserve a significant share of the blame.

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

Feels like whether it’s an ASIC (like @OpenAI Jalapeño) or a GPGPU, if you’re targeting AI inference, @nvidia Blackwell Ultra and Rubin are the benchmarks you can’t avoid.

Performance or performance per watt—if you can’t compete with NVIDIA, it might be time for more R&D.

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

After reading the paper, my biggest takeaway:

Open-weight models aren’t just about openness—they’re about maintaining American AI leadership.

[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang:

"Nobody writes prompts anymore. The new job is to write and handle loops."

This is the shift that's going to define the rest of 2026.

53 minutes of pure insight from one of the richest men on earth.

Watch it, then read the full guide on how to actually use loops below.

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@RaritySniperNFT @zipcy8888

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@RaritySniperNFT @ALPACADABRAZ

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@BurpThatFish Hello fam

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@swe_nfts GM

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@bullishNFT Hello

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@chriscantino Check out @zipcy8888

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@chriscantino Definitely @ALPACADABRAZ

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@songyak Hello fam

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@coffeemove12 Welcome to the fam

[the Unpacked Podcast @UnpackedCB]

@Cynyhy @ALPACADABRAZ Yours are so cute