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CM Chris McGuire On ChinaTalk

“This year alone, the number two, four, and five importers of AI chips are Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. And collectively, they've imported $80 billion worth of AI chips just this year. And that's not all necessarily for China, but I'll bet you a lot of it is. This is a consequence of the policy lapses.”

ChinaTalk · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026

“This year alone, the number two, four, and five importers of AI chips are Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. And collectively, they've imported $80 billion worth of AI chips just this year. And that's not all necessarily for China, but I'll bet you a lot of it is. This is a consequence of the policy lapses.” — Chris McGuire, ChinaTalk

Context

Discussing what the administration's chip-policy lapses have cost, McGuire gives import figures for three Southeast Asian countries as evidence of diversion risk. He frames the China share as an estimate, not proof.

Listen to the episode → More from Chris McGuire → More Geopolitics & World Affairs quotes →

Transcript

ChinaTalk Around 08:55 into the episode
Chris McGuire

You're right. I mean, I think that actually the, yeah, I, um,

Jordan Schneider

there's not much more to be said.

Chris McGuire

They're not. They're not. Obviously, just like we need to have stronger standards on these things. Right now, this year alone, the number two, four, and five importers of AI chips are Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. And collectively, they've imported $80 billion worth of AI chips just this year. And that's not all necessarily for China, but I'll bet you a lot of it is. This is a consequence of the policy lapses. And I think collectively, you're probably seeing that this has resulted in not just these insane scandals regarding the biggest or second biggest right now company in the world, but also the largest technology transfer in history between the United States and any of its adversaries of controlled goods. This is an insane scandal. And why was this allowed to happen? And I think that we don't have…

Jordan Schneider

They could explain it or they could just go away. Yeah, right? You know, it's been two years. Is it going to be more fun the next two years, guys? Are you like looking forward to this? And this is the whole dynamic with the, you know, with the investigations: it's way more fun to investigate people…

Chris McGuire

just change the policy, right? Fix the policy error that results. Resulted in this. Like, that's actually the most important thing that needs to happen, regardless of who does it. Like, and that would actually make some of the noise go away because you could at least say we fixed it. Like, that…

Speaker 3

now, Megaspeed is buying chips today. Still, it is still listed on NVIDIA's website as an official cloud partner.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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