⍼ John Nicholson ⍼

Today, my work over the years received another validation. The DoJ, together with the FBI, announced charges against three executives of SuperMicro (SMCI) for Conspiracy to Violate the Export Control Reform Act. Since at least early 2024, SMCI's executives built a sophisticated, systematic scheme to illegally divert billions of dollars worth of high-performance AI servers containing restricted Nvidia GPUs to China, using a pass-through company in Southeast Asia to evade U.S. export controls. I was the first to call out this smuggling phenomenon in late 2023, when it was just beginning to pick up volume. I tracked the flow of chips across Southeast Asia, including their final destinations in China, and identified the key participants, SMCI among them, documenting how the sophisticated, systemic scheme operated. What the DoJ described in its charging documents is precisely what I wrote about numerous times: the mechanics of how it works, the routes the GPUs travel from origin to their final destination in China, and the volume of the smuggling, which I estimated at tens of billions of dollars worth of GPUs. SMCI is a significant catch, but it is far from the only player in this smuggling ecosystem. Others remain uncharged. What has been equally troubling is that many companies, including public companies and their executives, have had knowing or willful blindness to this phenomenon, looking the other way in order to hit sales targets and meet Wall Street estimates. Meanwhile, the smuggling network has evolved in parallel with one of the fastest datacenter buildouts in Southeast Asia, involving numerous subsidiaries, local companies, and datacenter operators who have absorbed every lesson from the smuggling playbook and are now working around the clock to build a datacenter empire across the SEA region.

Después de años usando Apple Watch, me di cuenta que me genera ansiedad enterarme de las notificaciones de mi celular instantáneamente. Por mi paz mental, he vuelto a los relojes clásicos. 👌🏻

Walmart is rolling out digital price tags at all of its stores. At the same time, the corporate giant just secured a patent for "dynamically and automatically updating item prices.” Plus another patent for using machine learning to predict demand and recommend prices.

these two are probably VPs now clearing 275k