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AS Andrew Sharp Andrew Sharp Writer and podcaster who covers technology and, through a separate strand of the show, US-China relations.

“That's one of the ironies of this story: if you're an American startup trying to get access to NVIDIA, it's not easy to get from here to there and get your foot in the door with NVIDIA, whereas Megaspeed sprung up overnight and was suddenly flooded with NVIDIA chips.”

Sinocism (Bill Bishop) · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026

“That's one of the ironies of this story: if you're an American startup trying to get access to NVIDIA, it's not easy to get from here to there and get your foot in the door with NVIDIA, whereas Megaspeed sprung up overnight and was suddenly flooded with NVIDIA chips.” — Andrew Sharp, Sinocism (Bill Bishop)

Context

After a mention of Silicon Valley brokers for scarce compute, Sharp contrasts how hard Nvidia chips are to get for US startups with how easily Megaspeed, the company at the center of the scandal, obtained them.

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Transcript

Sinocism (Bill Bishop)
Andrew Sharp

customers probably impacts NVIDIA's pricing power going forward, which is one consideration. But

Bill Bishop

…the Wall Street Journal three weeks ago about like the people in Silicon Valley who are like the chip access brokers because there's so there's such a shortage of compute that that people are you know VC firms are all trying to you know one of their one of their edges is hey I can get you compute

Andrew Sharp

right well and that's one of the ironies of this story is if you're an American startup trying to get access to NVIDIA it's not easy to get from here to there and get your foot in the door with NVIDIA whereas MegaSpeed sprung up overnight and was suddenly flooded with NVIDIA chips

Bill Bishop

and then one of the other revelations will be if it if it turns out that mega speed then was funneling chips to um not just into the mainland but say to the say the PLA or other places that are more obviously non-commercial right yeah so so again this is one of those really frustrating things…

Andrew Sharp

there you go which would

Bill Bishop

be a real escalation so this is this is first I would

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

More from Sinocism (Bill Bishop)

“What he's doing with NVIDIA is not just optimizing margins and watching profits pile up. What he's doing is financing a lot of neoclouds, a lot of startups, open source development, all of which acts as sort of a counterweight to the hyperscalers and Anthropic and OpenAI.” — Andrew Sharp, Sinocism (Bill Bishop) “There is a massive credibility issue now at NVIDIA executive level. It's going to make it harder for them to be believed when they talk about compliance with export controls, compliance with sales into Southeast Asia that, we didn't know they were going to Chinese companies. It means you can't give the executive team any benefit of doubt at this point.” — Bill Bishop, Sinocism (Bill Bishop)