INDIA – 2025/06/14: In this stock photo, an AMD logo is seen on a smartphone with an Nvidia logo in the background. (Photo illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be thrilled. Check out DeepSeek’s latest AI launch last month. It works with chips created by Huawei. You are doing a job, US political class…
From the opening paragraph, readers could be excused for thinking that what they are about to read is a long-winded lament about the potential Chinese market share lost to Nvidia and AMD, not because they can’t help but compete, but because politicians with surnames like Warren, Cotton, Banks, Coons, Biden and Trump have decided to replace themselves in the market. And it is lamentation.
It is disappointing to see the growth of American companies held back by political naivety rooted in backwardness, anti-growth and anti-national security perception that trade is war. No trade is the antidote to war since it personifies mutually created prosperity. Except there’s more.
Just stop and think what happens to commercial progress when talented people work together. Beautiful commercial music follows. In other words, the brilliance of the AI minds in the US and China is begging them to cooperate. Failure is not just anti-development and national security, it is wildly anti-progress.
Unfortunately, and in the estimation of those high up in the US and Chinese political hierarchy, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a race between countries that must be won. This is why the CCP’s supposed enthusiasm for Huawei’s chip advances is as financially bankrupt as the failed attempts by the US political class to block the development of Chinese artificial intelligence through export controls.
However, there is a silver lining in the rampant silliness implied in government efforts to design trade. In their never-ending efforts to limit the flow of US genius to China and China to the US, the political types in Beijing and Washington, DC remind us how hopelessly retrograde their pursuit of export controls is. Check out DeepSeek again.
Looking back at the Hangzhou-based AI research company’s international AI development in 2025, we can take a look at how fast the market is moving. Lest we forget, the most notable thing about January 20, 2025 was that due to US export controls, DeepSeek that surprised both investors and technologists was not powered by top-of-the-line Nvidia chips. Which was telling, as was last month’s news about DeepSeek’s latest AI.
Implicit in export controls has long been the conceit that policymakers on both sides of the unfortunate US/China divide would have the faintest idea of what is technologically relevant to the future, and by extension what they should prevent the “US” and “China” from exporting so that one country stays ahead of the other. Good luck there. See the investor surprise in January 2025 and see the previous month.
If the evolution of artificial intelligence is taking arena-based investors and technologists by surprise, consider the blind eye of warring political types from the US and China. That’s because as you read this, AIs of interest to politicians have already been commercialized. Check out DeepSeek.
In short, they imagined the export controls worked out by US politicians what wasnot what it will be. And they clearly failed when it came to curbing the rise of China’s artificial intelligence in the extremely limited way politicians perceive it. But what is the invisible for Nvidia and AMD? As prosperous as you both are, where would anyone be today if they could work with any client, anywhere, without ankle-biting, backward-looking politicians?
Just imagine where Nvidia and AMD would be today if – as AI understood by Warren, Biden, Trump and others were commercialized – they were completely free to create the AI of the future without regard to national borders. Saying it would make DeepSeek’s creations look graphic is arguably the critical export checkpoint.
