Asked how much of Nvidia's China stance was a legacy of the globalist business era, chip historian Chris Miller says the company's mistake was denying that its chips are strategically important. He expects the spy scandal to end that argument.
Well, I think that's going to be the new policy. I think it's got to be something like that. Refocus in the U.S. market. That's where the money is anyway. And Southeast Asia and China are going to be written off.
…But if you go back to the 90s, it feels like that selling internationally, expanding your business globally is something you would get like a pat on the back for as a business leader in America. Does that track with your understanding of how the global political business landscape has evolved?
Yeah, I think the way I would frame it is that most chip companies came to terms with the fact that over the last five or 10 years, governments were going to have a big say in the future of the industry. And NVIDIA tried to push against that. NVIDIA wanted to stop that from happening. It thought it could tell Washington that actually its chips weren't strategically important. And now we've got not only evidence that Washington is going to make its voice heard, but that China believes they're so important that they're worth sending a spy to gather information on. And I think this is going to be the final data point that forces NVIDIA to realize that everyone else around them thinks that their chips are strategically significant, even if they don't think that governments are going to force that upon them.
It was always such a hard argument to make too, from their side, which is that, like, yes, AI is going to change everything, and we need to rally trillions of dollars of capital as a country and as the West to set up all this infrastructure because we are going to solve all the major challenges of…
Can you give us a quick tour of the other American semiconductor companies and their stances on China? Because Google tried to go to China. They tried to bring Google search to China. Unsuccessful. They were asked to censor it. They never really developed a business in China. I don't imagine that…
Yeah, I mean, I think Intel is certainly a more complicated case. I would say most chip companies want to sell their products around the world. Sure. Fair enough. That's their job. Their job is to sell. I think the difference is that most chip companies would have gone to the U.S. government and…