Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: It's a few weeks ago, but last month Trump was
Speaker 2: in the was in Saudi Arabia, he was in the
Speaker 2: Middle East, and he sold a bunch of chips.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the chip's announcement was kind of overshadowed
Speaker 3: by some of the pomp and ceremony around that visit.
Speaker 3: Did you see the famous hair flipping No, oh, you
Speaker 3: didn't see that, So you need to look this up.
Speaker 3: So when Trump arrived in the UAE, part of his
Speaker 3: big you know, the greeting and the red carpet getting
Speaker 3: rolled out for him was a bunch of emmiati women
Speaker 3: doing a hair flipping dance. I gotta say, I wish
Speaker 3: I could flip my hair like that, but sadly I
Speaker 3: could not.
Speaker 2: Can I say, like Trump seems very at home in
Speaker 2: the Gulf States, you know what I'm saying, Like it
Speaker 2: feels like, setting aside many other things that there is
Speaker 2: like a similar sense of esthetics.
Speaker 3: Grant I was about to say that he's like, I think.
Speaker 2: He's very comfortable in those countries.
Speaker 3: I was about to say, his taste in interior decorating
Speaker 3: is exactly the same as what you see in palaces
Speaker 3: and hotels in Saudi Arabia and places like that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, No, I think just the whole vibe is like, oh,
Speaker 2: his on home territory. But I think the AI stuff
Speaker 2: is really interesting. Obviously, for a lot of reasons, the
Speaker 2: US wants to sell more things. One of the things
Speaker 2: that we can sell in various flavors is AI technology.
Speaker 2: But there's this weird like I don't know what the
Speaker 2: word cross currents or whatever, which is that we want
Speaker 2: to sell more stuff, and yet we also don't want
Speaker 2: our stuff to be in the hands of perceived geopolitical rivals,
Speaker 2: and so we cut off our own sales. China is
Speaker 2: obviously the most salient example here, but it sort of
Speaker 2: makes this interesting tension when we think of the role
Speaker 2: of AI sales tech sales in sort of international relations
Speaker 2: and diplomacy.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Well, I also find this interesting from the UAE slash
Speaker 3: Abu Dhabi side of things, right, because the UAE, it's
Speaker 3: strategically aligned with the US in many ways, but it's
Speaker 3: very commercially aligned with China, and you know, you have
Speaker 3: a lot of Chinese commerce coming through the ports and
Speaker 3: things like that, so I'm very curious what they see
Speaker 3: in this steal and how they're navigating those two sides
Speaker 3: as well.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: I'm very excited we have the perfect guest, someone one
Speaker 2: of our colleagues we've had on the podcast before. We're
Speaker 2: going to be speaking with Mackenzie Hawkins, tech and geopolitics
Speaker 2: reporter Bloomberg News. She's now based in Hong Kong, sadly
Speaker 2: for us, but thankfully she's you know, staying up late
Speaker 2: for this recording. Mackenzie, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 2: back on odd locks.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2: First of all, why don't you just give us the
Speaker 2: specific details, as the salient details as you understand them
Speaker 2: in terms of this big, big AI deal that Trump
Speaker 2: announced when he did his golf tour.
Speaker 4: So in the four day span or so that Trump
Speaker 4: was in the Middle East, you saw American tech companies
Speaker 4: and companies in golf nations announce hundreds of billions of
Speaker 4: dollars worth of AI deals. Specifically, many of them focused
Speaker 4: on AI infrastructure, building out the data centers that house
Speaker 4: AI chips that are used to train and deploy large
Speaker 4: language models, and that involved one of the biggest data
Speaker 4: centers potentially in the world, a project anchored by the
Speaker 4: Abu Dhabi AI firm G forty two, with key participation
Speaker 4: from Oracle, from Open AI, from Nvidia, huge volumes of
Speaker 4: Nvidia ship sales going to both the UAE and Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 4: as well as sales from Nvidia's rival Advanced micro Devices,
Speaker 4: and all told, we sort of ended the week, and
Speaker 4: the deals announcements actually continued into the following week. We
Speaker 4: ended this trip going from a world where the two
Speaker 4: main players with significant AI data center capacity the US,
Speaker 4: of course, and then China also has major ambitions and still,
Speaker 4: even if all of these deals fall through as expected,
Speaker 4: which is an if, the US will maintain the vast
Speaker 4: majority of the world's computational power, but we have two
Speaker 4: new serious players in the UAE and in Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3: One thing I know from living in Apudapi for a
Speaker 3: couple of years is that Apudapi loves building a giant
Speaker 3: campus with some sort of foreign partner like that is
Speaker 3: always happening and seems to be happening more and more.
Speaker 3: But okay, so from the US side. You know, the
Speaker 3: US wants to be a powerful player in AI and
Speaker 3: everything that comes with it, chips, data centers, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And they want to sell that technology to other countries.
Speaker 3: What's the issue with the deal? Why is it controversial?
Speaker 4: So there are a couple of sort of categories of
Speaker 4: disagreement in Washington, if you The first is a basic
Speaker 4: economic competitive this argument. You have people, especially on the
Speaker 4: Democratic side of the aisle, saying, you know, why are
Speaker 4: we building a data center in Abu Dhabi when we
Speaker 4: could be doing that in Ohio or in Pennsylvania. The
Speaker 4: response from people who are in favor of these deals is,
Speaker 4: we are building data centers in the US. Trump is
Speaker 4: trying to cut red tape to facilitate data center deals
Speaker 4: across the country, and the UAE accord, in particular, because
Speaker 4: there's now a bilateral arrangement between American and AMRADI officials,
Speaker 4: includes this reciprocal investment portion where you know, for the
Speaker 4: amount that US companies are investing in the Gulf nation,
Speaker 4: we'll get a reciprocal amount on American soil. But there
Speaker 4: are still some people who say, why wouldn't we do
Speaker 4: all of this on US soil? For as long as possible.
Speaker 4: Then there's the China question, and that has been the
Speaker 4: sort of central debate in the development of US global
Speaker 4: export controls on semi connector chips that really ramped up
Speaker 4: during the Biden administration, and now the Trump administration has
Speaker 4: taken a very different tack, where the question is not,
Speaker 4: you know, will we ever sell chips to markets in
Speaker 4: the Middle East or in Southeast Asia, but what is
Speaker 4: the risk that those chips could ultimately benefit China, either
Speaker 4: by Chinese AI companies remotely accessing data centers in third
Speaker 4: countries to train AI models from the physical hardware being
Speaker 4: actually diverted and transshipped to China, or from those countries
Speaker 4: taking American hardware and AI know how and then making
Speaker 4: technically separate but kind of related investments in Chinese tech.
Speaker 4: And so that's the rub, and the question is what
Speaker 4: conditions is the US going to put on these deals
Speaker 4: to ensure that you're safeguarding American technology and know how
Speaker 4: and ensuring that in diffusing the technology around the world,
Speaker 4: you're not inadvertently and benefiting a US adversary.
Speaker 2: World quick specific question, are there stipulations in the deal
Speaker 2: that setting aside the implementation of it that are designed
Speaker 2: to create safeguards or checkpoints such that the chips that
Speaker 2: go to the golf are then transship to Chinese data centers,
Speaker 2: Like do they have some ostensible mechanism for avoiding that?
Speaker 4: Yes, the US government has a small handful of export
Speaker 4: control officers that operate globally, and by small I mean
Speaker 4: like very low double digits that can go in and
Speaker 4: like check physical facilities and see, okay, are the chips
Speaker 4: still here? They talk to the data center operators and such.
Speaker 4: The Trump administration has asked for more funding for the
Speaker 4: agency that executes those controls, and there are high level
Speaker 4: provisions in this bilateral arrangement between the US and the
Speaker 4: UAE about preventing diversion to China. There are also high
Speaker 4: level provisions about restricting China's remote access to facilities and
Speaker 4: around inbound and outbound investment from China reciprocated with the
Speaker 4: Gulf nations in question. Those are high level arrangements, and
Speaker 4: the big company deals were announced when the security arrangements
Speaker 4: remained at a fairly high level. And so there are
Speaker 4: some folks in Washington who are concerned that the US
Speaker 4: didn't hammer out all of the specifics dot every I,
Speaker 4: cross every tea before announcing these deals and topping them
Speaker 4: as major wins for American economic competitiveness and national security.
Speaker 2: So it seems like when we talk about the US
Speaker 2: China AI rivalry, there's two potential dimensions, which is one
Speaker 2: is there's this sort of anxiety like China gonna achieve
Speaker 2: AGI first or is it gonna raise ahead of you know,
Speaker 2: are their labs gonna be better than our labs, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But then there seems to be this other one and actually,
Speaker 2: like David Sachs, the All In podcast host but also
Speaker 2: Trump's as are, seems to have a slightly different spin
Speaker 2: on the question, which is just like, no, like we
Speaker 2: really should just want as much US tech currently diffused
Speaker 2: out in the world, that the dominance of the Kuda
Speaker 2: ecosystem and Nvidia, et cetera is what we should really
Speaker 2: care about, and that we're cutting our shooting ourselves at
Speaker 2: the foot if we get too nervous about where our
Speaker 2: chips are.
Speaker 3: Going in the world.
Speaker 4: David Sachs basically defined winning in the AI race as
Speaker 4: capturing the vast majority of the global market for AI hardware,
Speaker 4: and of course, the US ability to do. That is
Speaker 4: a function of Vidia's dominance and US restrictions that have
Speaker 4: been levied for years on China's semiconductor industry and its
Speaker 4: ability to build a chip making prowess. So we've seen
Speaker 4: actually a couple of estimates recently of what china se
Speaker 4: conductor landscape looks like. You had Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik
Speaker 4: tell the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. He was asked
Speaker 4: by a senators and oh, I think I've read that
Speaker 4: China can make less than four hundred thousand advanced chips
Speaker 4: a year, And Lutinix said, actually, no, they say they're
Speaker 4: making them, and they're not. It's probably closer to two
Speaker 4: hundred thousand. He didn't define what chips he was talking about.
Speaker 4: Advanced chips could include mobile processors, for example, in addition
Speaker 4: to AI chips, But for the sake of discussion, let's
Speaker 4: say it's waways ascend AI chips, which are the best
Speaker 4: domestic model in China. That number is really far short
Speaker 4: of China's domestic demand, which the market research firm tech
Speaker 4: Insights put at around one point five million AI accelerators
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four. Compared to what Lennink says is
Speaker 4: two hundred thousand that China can domestically produce. There's another
Speaker 4: estimate out there from the research firm Semi Analysis that
Speaker 4: says China can produce around three hundred and eighty thousand
Speaker 4: of its most advanced AI chips domestically and that will
Speaker 4: reach multiple millions next year. Now, in addition to China's
Speaker 4: domestic chip making capacity, there is also a significant infusion
Speaker 4: that Huawei got from ordering a reported two point nine
Speaker 4: million chips from TSMC, the global leader in actual chip manufacturing,
Speaker 4: through an intermediary that has since been sanctioned by the
Speaker 4: US government. And that's not an insignificant one time infusion
Speaker 4: into China's stockpile. Now, the Biden administration released a rule
Speaker 4: in their final week in office increasing due diligence requirements
Speaker 4: for foundries, which are the companies that actually make chips
Speaker 4: designed by others. And TSMC hasn't commented publicly on the
Speaker 4: two point nine million number, but they said that they're
Speaker 4: cooperating with a US investigation into the matter. So the
Speaker 4: question for the US is not will China ever develop
Speaker 4: good chips that can compete on a global scale. I
Speaker 4: don't think that policymakers from the Biden administration to the
Speaker 4: Trump administration have any reservations really about thinking, of course,
Speaker 4: China's a serious competitive technological player. It's about when that
Speaker 4: could happen, and when that could happen in a way
Speaker 4: that would allow China to export in significant quantities to
Speaker 4: foreign markets. So there's this really interesting example that happened
Speaker 4: a couple of weeks ago where the Deputy Communications Minister
Speaker 4: in Malaysia, in a speech that was picked up in
Speaker 4: local media, said we have this new national AI system
Speaker 4: that's powered by three thousand Huawei Ascent chips. Now, three
Speaker 4: thousand chips is like a super small number of chips.
Speaker 4: It's a fraction of what's needed for a mid sized
Speaker 4: data center. But it was the first known example, or
Speaker 4: at least one of the first note examples, at least
Speaker 4: the first that I attract of an international deployment from China.
Speaker 4: And so there was this big reaction in DC of like,
Speaker 4: oh my god, it's happening. David Zachs tweeted, as I've
Speaker 4: been warning, the full Chinese stack is here. We rescinded
Speaker 4: the Biden diffusion rule just in time. That's a reference
Speaker 4: to global semiconductor controls that the Biden administration imposed on
Speaker 4: pretty much the entire world in their last week in office,
Speaker 4: and David sax finished, the American AI stack needs to
Speaker 4: be unleashed to compete. So I was super interested in this.
Speaker 4: My colleagues in kual Umpur were super interested in this,
Speaker 4: and so we called the Malaysian Communications Ministry. We said, hey,
Speaker 4: can we get some more information about this project and
Speaker 4: they said, oh, we're retracting the Wawei part of that speech.
Speaker 4: Now important in context for this is that it came
Speaker 4: a couple of days after the US Commerce Department had
Speaker 4: issued guidance saying that it considers the use of Huawei's
Speaker 4: ascendships anywhere in the world to be a violation of
Speaker 4: US export controls. Now they've since removed that anywhere in
Speaker 4: the world. Line, it's like this whole thing and the
Speaker 4: ongoing units China US China trade negotiations. But that's an
Speaker 4: important piece of understanding Malaysia's reaction here. So we published
Speaker 4: a story that was basically like Malaysia's distancing itself from
Speaker 4: this Huawei project. And the response that David Sachs had
Speaker 4: to that after on Twitter was that's not a lot
Speaker 4: of chips, but it does show China's intent to export
Speaker 4: the Huawei plus Deep Seek stack. Deep Seek was also
Speaker 4: part of Malaysia's approach, and it's a harbinger of what's
Speaker 4: to come.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: Malaysia is like, we're going to assert our sovereignty. We
Speaker 4: get to decide which technology we want to use. But
Speaker 4: it was really interesting to watch the reaction to this
Speaker 4: play out in DC because, on the one hand, some
Speaker 4: people treated it as evidence that the threat they've been
Speaker 4: warning about is here and the US therefore needs to
Speaker 4: be super aggressive about exporting Nvidia chips as quickly and
Speaker 4: as widely and in as large quantities as possible. And
Speaker 4: there are some people who read it as this is propaganda,
Speaker 4: This is Huawei trying to demonstrate that it can export
Speaker 4: internationally when really it can't even meet domestic demand. Now,
Speaker 4: last thing I'll say here before I turn it back
Speaker 4: over to you guys, is there was a really interesting
Speaker 4: interview with Wawai's founder in People's Daily, the official newspaper
Speaker 4: of the Chinese Communist Party, just I guess today in
Speaker 4: Hong Kong yesterday in DC, depending time zone you're in,
Speaker 4: where he said Huawei's actually still behind the US. US
Speaker 4: overestimating our capabilities, but we're making progress now. It will
Speaker 4: always still constrained, in large part due to US restrictions
Speaker 4: on semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Speaker 3: Since you brought up the global export controls on chips,
Speaker 3: it seems to me like there's a fundamental tension here
Speaker 3: where if you want to export US technology, you kind
Speaker 3: of have to accept that some of the risk is
Speaker 3: that it's going to leak into parts of the world
Speaker 3: where you know, you might not want it to be,
Speaker 3: so China, And when I imagine, you know, if the
Speaker 3: US says it wants to release its tech stack globally, sorry,
Speaker 3: I have an image in my mind, it's like, release
Speaker 3: the hounds, release the tech stacks. If they want to
Speaker 3: do that, it seems like I guess they either have
Speaker 3: to fine tune the export controls or harden them up.
Speaker 3: And I'm not entirely sure how they would do that,
Speaker 3: given that we already had the experience of the Biden
Speaker 3: administration's export controls, Like what levers can they actually pull
Speaker 3: here to ensure that American technology goes global, But at
Speaker 3: the same time, it doesn't go global in a way
Speaker 3: that we don't want it to.
Speaker 4: It's a really challenging question. I mean, that's why you
Speaker 4: saw the Biden administration essentially pause large scale Nvidia and
Speaker 4: am Dai chip shipments for the better part of a year.
Speaker 4: You know, the US restrictions the like. Really US restrictions
Speaker 4: on AI chips started in October twenty twenty two, a
Speaker 4: date that anybody in the Chinese tech industry would remember
Speaker 4: when the US said all right, no more in Vidia
Speaker 4: exports of China without a license at the highest end
Speaker 4: of video technology. That's a month before chad GPT launched.
Speaker 4: And if you think about what's happened in the you know,
Speaker 4: nearly three years since then, there's this massive interest from
Speaker 4: countries all over the world in developing what's you know,
Speaker 4: people in the industry called sovereign AI, basically the idea
Speaker 4: that as a nation, you have the hardware and software
Speaker 4: infrastructure to develop, train, deploy your own AIM models. And
Speaker 4: the Gulf is a really interesting first case study of
Speaker 4: a really organized ambition to make that happen. But there
Speaker 4: are countries all over the world that want that. In
Speaker 4: video CEO Trens and Wong has been talking about that
Speaker 4: for a very long time. Mean, Sam Altman has been
Speaker 4: going to the Middle East looking for funding for US
Speaker 4: infrastructure projects, of course, setting up what became this five
Speaker 4: gigawat data center in Abu Dhabi, and the Biden administration,
Speaker 4: after they restricted shipments to China in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: followed up a year later expanding the restrictions not just
Speaker 4: on the technology that can go to China, but also
Speaker 4: the global footprint of the controls, and they added around
Speaker 4: forty countries on the basis of the risk of diversion
Speaker 4: to China. And then about a year after that, in
Speaker 4: their very final week in office, they released this global
Speaker 4: framework called the AI Diffusion Rule that basically split the
Speaker 4: world into three categories of chip access. In Tier one,
Speaker 4: you had the US and very close partner countries that
Speaker 4: the Biden administration viewed to have similar export control regimes
Speaker 4: and capacities to those offered by Washington. In Tier three
Speaker 4: the bottom, where you have your China, Russia or on
Speaker 4: North Korea US adversaries that basically just continue to not
Speaker 4: have effectively access to advanced American tech. And then you
Speaker 4: had everybody in the middle, which was most of the world,
Speaker 4: everybody from treaty allies like Poland to Singapore to Yemen,
Speaker 4: and the Biden administration's approach was, we're going to cap
Speaker 4: the number of chips that can go to these countries.
Speaker 4: But a company can apply for a license called a
Speaker 4: validated end user designation, which is fancy Washington speak for basically,
Speaker 4: I'll submit to you the security requirements that I'm going
Speaker 4: to apply to a data center that I'm going to
Speaker 4: build an X, Y, and Z place, and in exchange,
Speaker 4: you were going to can make it easier for me
Speaker 4: to get licenses to ship to that place in the future.
Speaker 4: And because I've made all of those security promises, my
Speaker 4: projects are going to be exempted from the national cap
Speaker 4: in this place. And the Biden administration's goal was to
Speaker 4: set that cap at a level that incentivized companies like
Speaker 4: Microsoft or like Oracle to agree to a bunch of
Speaker 4: security conditions, apply for licenses, and then sure, go ahead
Speaker 4: build your data centers in the places that you want to,
Speaker 4: as long as you keep most of your compute capacity
Speaker 4: in the US and friendly countries, and no more than
Speaker 4: seven percent of your computing capacity in any one country
Speaker 4: that is in another tier. So this immensely complicated regulation
Speaker 4: got a lot of blowback from all over the tech industry.
Speaker 4: Although a couple of supporters of some of the provisions
Speaker 4: in Nvidia will surprise nobody was one of the strongest opponents.
Speaker 4: Oracle was also a huge opponent because that cap on
Speaker 4: putting more than seven percent of your capacity in any
Speaker 4: one country was a big problem for Oracle's massive plan
Speaker 4: data center Expanision in Malaysia. So you had this big
Speaker 4: jockeying for position among tech companies and also among countries,
Speaker 4: some of whom were like, we cannot execute the plans
Speaker 4: that we want to within the constraints of this cap.
Speaker 4: Others of whom didn't necessarily have super ambitious data center plans,
Speaker 4: but we're kind of like, what the heck, Like, why
Speaker 4: are we being put in the same category as this
Speaker 4: country or this country or this country. I mean, you
Speaker 4: had a couple of European Union nations that were put
Speaker 4: in Tier two, but most of them were put in
Speaker 4: the most preferential tier, and so the EU is like, Okay,
Speaker 4: we're trying to disrupt free trade within the block. And
Speaker 4: that debate sort of carried out all throughout the first
Speaker 4: couple of months of the Trump administration. Before the Trump
Speaker 4: officials decided all right, we're acting that rule and we're
Speaker 4: going to work on a replacement. And the deals that
Speaker 4: we saw happen in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are
Speaker 4: the best indication that we have so far of what
Speaker 4: that replacement could look like. And we're shifting from this,
Speaker 4: you know, big global regulation to a lot of country
Speaker 4: specific deals that will probably have some commonalities but will
Speaker 4: really be negotiated on a bilateral basis.
Speaker 2: The absolutely fascinating topic, and you explain it very clearly,
Speaker 2: Mackenzie Hawkins. Thank you so much for coming back on
Speaker 2: odd Lots. Thank you so much for staying up late
Speaker 2: for the recording, and talk to you soon hopefully.
Speaker 4: Thanks much for having me.
Speaker 2: I find this story to be extremely fascinating for multiple reasons.
Speaker 2: I guess one is like, you know, when we think
Speaker 2: about like export controls, or I think about what you sell,
Speaker 2: you know, you have to think like traditionally like defense tech, right,
Speaker 2: and so it's like, okay, you have to make a
Speaker 2: deal at the high level before one country can buy
Speaker 2: jets or whatever from you. But this is AI is
Speaker 2: so weird because it's also just this commercial tech that
Speaker 2: companies are going to use in random chatbots and software
Speaker 2: as a service applications, et cetera. And yet we still
Speaker 2: sort of treat it as potentially being defense like in
Speaker 2: its implication.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of funny. I'm thinking now, imagine like
Speaker 3: reading one of the stories about AI and China US
Speaker 3: competition and replacing like chatbots AI with ballistic missiles, and
Speaker 3: like what that language would actually read like. But okay,
Speaker 3: two things here. So it is true people talk about
Speaker 3: the race for AI supremacy in these sort of militaristic terms,
Speaker 3: which obviously raises the question of what exactly success looks
Speaker 3: like in this sphere. And you brought up the point that,
Speaker 3: you know, some people seem to think it's achieving AGI
Speaker 3: for some people like Lutnik, and some people like sex
Speaker 3: seem to think that it's basically taking market share or
Speaker 3: having dominant market share. And I don't know, Like, it's
Speaker 3: strikes me that there's there's probably not going to be
Speaker 3: a moment when the US can declare victory or China
Speaker 3: can declare victory, but we should at least have some
Speaker 3: sort of like agreed idea of where we're heading here.
Speaker 3: And then the second thing I was thinking about is
Speaker 3: again because all of this is constantly couched in militaristic
Speaker 3: language and basically competition between the world's two biggest economies.
Speaker 3: You can think of data centers as critical infrastructure, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so I guess the question is should we be
Speaker 3: building more critical infrastructure in a place like the UAE.
Speaker 3: On the one hand, you know, the US and the
Speaker 3: UAE have a strong partnership. There's a US military presence
Speaker 3: in the UAE already, US border control at the airport,
Speaker 3: which is very, very convenient. But you know, we also
Speaker 3: get oil from the Middle East, and I kind of
Speaker 3: wonder if we want to like double down on our
Speaker 3: infrastructure related dependence on that particular region.
Speaker 2: So on the one hand, the day Sacks view is like,
Speaker 2: this is a business right and the goal is to
Speaker 2: you know, have greater market share, et cetera. But part
Speaker 2: of the reason anyone is even talking about this and
Speaker 2: such and where every country needs to have their own
Speaker 2: compute is because there is this perception that it's existential technology.
Speaker 2: So the two sides like they sort of play off
Speaker 2: of each other this. You know, there's always this sort
Speaker 2: of like Baptist and bootleggers sort of way. I think
Speaker 2: about this, where both sides of these questions end up
Speaker 2: boosting each other because David's view is like, Oh, all
Speaker 2: of this, all of this worrying is wrong, and it's
Speaker 2: just it's a business and we want to have more
Speaker 2: market share, and all of the he's very critical of,
Speaker 2: like the AI doomers who think it's going to destroy
Speaker 2: all the jobs, because he claims, oh, this is a
Speaker 2: trojan horse for more regulation of the tech, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And yet if it weren't for the AI doomers, if
Speaker 2: it weren't for all the people thinking this is existential technology,
Speaker 2: the wouldn't be that much demand to just absolutely have
Speaker 2: this many chips within your bod, etc. So in all
Speaker 2: of these stories with AI, it's like there's different perspectives,
Speaker 2: and even people on opposite sides of the debate end
Speaker 2: up like bolstering the others beating each other in anyway,
Speaker 2: I think these are interesting stories to watch. I had
Speaker 2: missed that whole thing with Huawei ostensibly and then Malaysia
Speaker 2: backtracking about its involvement, but certainly their AI chips being
Speaker 2: used globally would be a very interesting development to watch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, lots more to talk about on this topic, I'm
Speaker 3: sure shall we leave it there for now?
Speaker 2: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 2: Follow our guest Mackenzie Hawkins, She's at mac Hawk. Follow
Speaker 2: our producers Kerman Rodriguez at Kerman armand dash Ol Bennett
Speaker 2: at dashbod and kil Brooks at Cale Brooks. From our
Speaker 2: odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots,
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