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Start free trial →Odd Lots · Money & Markets · November 2026
Asked why Nvidia would risk selling to questionable customers when chips are in short supply, Hawkins explains Nvidia's interest in remote-access rentals by Chinese companies in Southeast Asia, and says it is a policy choice the US government has made.
…to demonstrate to the U.S. that it does take this seriously, but also has so deeply lost credibility on this issue that it's like a little bit of a catch-22. And that's not trying to absolve NVIDIA responsibility, just sort of explaining a political reality that the company now finds itself in.
…scrambling to get chips. There's so much demand out there. Like it's hard to fill it all. They can afford to be selective with their customers, right? Like, do you have a working theory for like why would they even take the chance if demand is so strong that they could sell to pretty much anyone?
That's a good question. NVIDIA's primary arguments on export controls are about the market share, the global market share of AI infrastructure that is American. They sort of view Huawei, their primary competitor in China, as this sort of existential threat to U.S. dominance. And their arguments are basically that NVIDIA's interests are U.S. interests. And so, you know, when you talk about the question of remote access, you know, companies completely legally renting the use of NVIDIA hardware that Chinese companies can't purchase themselves to those Chinese companies. You know, that's a policy choice by the U.S. government. You know, a lot of people describe that as like, oh, it's a workaround of the export controls. It's the loophole of the export controls. It's legal. The U.S. has the ability to make it illegal and it's legal in the vast majority of cases. You know, for NVIDIA, that's a good thing because NVIDIA chips are filling all these data centers in Southeast Asia that in many cases wouldn't exist if not for the off-take demand from Chinese companies. It's the same reason that NVIDIA wants to be able to freely sell its chips in China to say we need to be able to compete with Huawei on its own…
I just want to point out one thing. We've talked to Ian Dunning twice from Hudson River Trading who has said he is not having a hard time getting GPUs. He's having a hard time getting GPU places to plug in.
Yeah.
So one could, it's possible, at least it seems possible that there is not as much like unlimited demand for GPUs per se as maybe NVIDIA like this as NVIDIA would like to claim. And that actually, like, let's say the bottleneck is in places to plug them in, that if you want to actually sell the most…