“If you have a company that just pops up out of nowhere and is like, hey, I want $5 billion worth of chips, maybe the U.S. government should have a say into whether we should or not. And we have no visibility into this because the Commerce Department is not enforcing these policies.”
Prof G Markets · Money & Markets · November 2026
Context
Asked why Commerce delayed blacklisting Megaspeed, Chris McGuire says earlier rules would have required licenses for chip sales to untrusted companies in places like Malaysia and Singapore, but the administration chose not to enforce them. He argues the Megaspeed situation was foreseeable.
Transcript
…this something that was influenced by Chinese spies? I don't know. And we won't know, but I think these, you know, now all of this is open for questioning. And when you talk about what are NVIDIA's positions on export controls in China and why, they just obviously have no credibility at this point.
…since the fall of last year. And so it's just kind of remarkable that no action was taken until this was sort of broken out into the public sphere. I mean, what are we to make of that? What does that say about this White House and I guess the extent to which they view this as an actual problem?
…untrusted companies in Malaysia, in Singapore, in a bunch of other countries around the world that are not close allies. If it's an untrusted company, they can't receive billions of dollars of AI chips without a license, which to me is a very rational policy. We obviously want companies like Amazon and Microsoft and generally trusted allied companies to be building these data centers. But if you have a company that just pops up out of nowhere and is like, hey, I want $5 billion worth of chips, maybe the U.S. government should have a say into whether we should or not. And we have no visibility into this because the Commerce Department is not enforcing these policies. So I think very clearly we need to be asking why there's not a good answer. And at the minimum, they should be enforcing the regulations that are already on the books that would actually prevent this situation in the first place.
I think a lot of people, you asked the question, why? Why didn't they investigate this? Or I guess they did. And then why didn't they take any action? Why did they, in some cases, halt the examination and the investigation while their own export policy was literally designed to prevent something…
I agree that there is something weird going on. And what is interesting, though, is the fact that you have this reporting that says the Treasury Department is asking the Commerce Department to take action. The White House is actually pushing the Hill to pass bills that make export controls…
Well, say more about that because that's going to be so crucial for investors, especially. Because if we learn that there, I mean, we know that NVIDIA gets a significant amount of its revenue from non-China Asia Asian companies. And if this is another example of, you know, I mean, if this is the…
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