Mackenzie Hawkins

New: Chinese firms aim to install ~115,000 advanced Nvidia chips in dozens of AI data centers. Construction is underway. DeepSeek wants to collaborate What’s unclear is how they plan to get hardware that the US has effectively banned from sale to China 🧵bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-…

I’m not on this site much these days, but I’m always happy to talk about chips on Signal @/mackhawk.71. I treat messages there as off record unless agreed otherwise & take source protection very seriously Here's the free link to our Megaspeed story 12/12 bloomberg.com/news/features/…

There's a lot more in our piece, which is free to read for a week. It was a big team effort with @imandylin2, @KariSoo1, @villeheiskanen & many others This story isn't just about export controls enforcement. It's also about underlying policy — for China & everywhere else 11/

New: Nvidia’s biggest Southeast Asian partner imported tens of thousands more AI chips than Nvidia saw in its data centers, told potential investors about a “specific area” facility in an unnamed country — & has something of a Chinese corporate twin 1/ bloomberg.com/news/features/…

Scoop: OpenAI is seeking to build a massive new data center in India that could mark a major step forward in Asia for its Stargate-branded artificial intelligence infrastructure push bloomberg.com/news/articles/… with @mackhawk

Lutnick confirmed talks between the admin & Intel for the US to take a stake in the chipmaker, casting the plan as a bid to turn Chips Act grants into equity “It’s not governance, we’re just converting what was a grant under Biden into equity,” Lutnick told CNBC. “Non-voting.”

This was almost exactly a year ago btw:

Trump admin is in talks for a 10% stake in Intel that would involve converting some/all of the company’s Chips Act grants into equity. Nothing finalized Intel has been in line for $7.9b in grants for commercial manufacturing & $3b for military production bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Trump has dialed down his confrontational tone with China in an effort to secure a trade deal & a meeting with Xi, according to people familiar with internal deliberations: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… @jendeben

Jensen says Nvidia hasn’t yet gotten any licenses to sell H20 chips in China but expects those approvals soon: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Still unclear what volume of approvals Nvidia (or AMD) will receive, as we wrote yesterday: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Fuller Bessent remarks from today here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last month: “There is no quid pro quo in terms of chips for rare earths” And on Bloomberg TV just now, asked whether the US is allowing Nvidia H20 sales to China as a quid pro quo for rare earths: “Yeah, I think it was all part of a mosaic.”