00:16:14 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:16:14] S2: Yeah, here we go. So in the Times today, Nvidia chiefs seen as target of Chinese spy plot. A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action. That's interesting. American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence, a top executive at a Singapore based data center. Company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced NVIDIA AI chips to China, and now American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset funneling information to Beijing. But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive Alice Wong, a Chinese citizen revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen. For years Washington had worked to deny China the technology needed to patch or surpass The United States in the intense global competition for superiority in AI, the discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to mister Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the AI revolution, as well as an influential ally, president Trump, set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. So, good opportunity to rewind and talk about a show that we did on October 10, where we talked about this company and the CEO, Megaspeed. [00:17:34] S0: Megaspeed. And you called it a great name. [00:17:37] S2: Mean, it is a great name. I gave
00:17:37 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:17:37] S2: Mean, it is a great name. I gave [00:17:38] S0: her a round of applause for being a [00:17:39] S2: The name is fantastic. We're reporter? That's, you know, it's always good to say something nice. Yeah. So the name is fantastic. Totally. So I asked Chad to kind of summarize our discussion. Yes. I a question and a finding. So did you discuss Alice Wong, the CEO, accused spy, finding, yes. Did you discuss her access to Jensen, yes. Did you highlight her Chinese state media background, yes. So she had been a reporter for Chinese state media prior to starting a sort of Malaysian, Singaporean hyper state. [00:18:14] S0: Non Is Chinese state media? [00:18:17] S2: Did we question Megaspeed's activities? [00:18:19] S0: Don't have independent media. Right? So if you were... If you do anything in the media, it's by definition you're working for the government? [00:18:26] S2: No. I mean, I I don't think that's like actually how they're defining it. [00:18:29] S0: Okay. This is like the central state media. Like being like the [00:18:32] S2: press secretary. Yeah. You can make the argument that all their media is gonna come under the influence Yeah. Of the state. [00:18:38] S0: Because this is like yeah, is it is it working
00:18:38 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:18:38] S0: Because this is like yeah, is it is it working [00:18:40] S2: for Anyways, let let me continue. Did you discuss Alice Wong? Yes. Did you discuss her access to Jensen? Yes. Did you highlight her Chinese state media background? Yes. Did you question Megaspeed's activities? Yes. Did you explicitly suggest she was a spy? No. Could the discussion be interpreted as raising suspicions? Yes. So it was too early to go out and say like, you know, we didn't have any real details around the situation but the whole situation was so suspicious that it was hard to... I'm surprised it's taken this long for it to kind of bubble up. [00:19:13] S0: Yeah. Yeah. No. It's very, very tricky. Yeah. I mean, it seems like at the very least, it's like she is being accused of being deployed to figure out how to gain access to advanced AI chips. So how how can more NVIDIA chips land in Malaysia? Right? Because the more the more chips that get to Malaysia, the more inference that will be available for [00:19:36] S2: Yeah. [00:19:36] S0: China, essentially. [00:19:37] S2: Matthew's in the chat pretty much saying what we're all thinking, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you get fooled. Can't get fooled again. [00:19:45] S0: That's a great quote. George W Bush. [00:19:47] S2: One of the best quotes in [00:19:48] S0: One of the best. [00:19:49] S2: White House history. [00:19:50] S0: Yeah. That's good. Well, Jensen has not responded to this. He he has not actually posted since October [00:19:58] S2: here's the thing. 20 Have they had interactions over the last...
00:19:58 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:19:58] S2: here's the thing. 20 Have they had interactions over the last... [00:20:03] S0: We've been featured together. Right? [00:20:05] S2: Over the last year, though. [00:20:06] S0: Oh, interesting. This might be, like, kinda old. [00:20:08] S2: I think it might be I think it might be old news. [00:20:12] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You'd imagine if, like, the The New York Times is on the hunt that, like, the CIA would also be like, hey, you gotta stop talking to this person. They are trying to get information out of you, something like that. I don't know. But it'll be it'll be interesting to see what happens with mega speed with Malaysia in general. Like, it's kind of a canary in the coal mine, that chart of compute by country. If Malaysia continues to ramp compute capacity, it's like we don't know the cause, but we know that there's a problem. You know? It's kind of like if you're if you're measuring a like an athlete and you're and you're noticing like insane blood glucose levels or something. Like, you might notice that there's a problem before you can diagnose it. Malaysia seems to be in that camp of like, it's odd if they're scaling dramatically. Yeah. Given the local... This... The local economy. [00:21:14] S2: It's suspicious.
00:21:14 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:21:14] S2: It's suspicious. [00:21:15] S0: Yeah. And so, I don't know. I mean, there's there's a whole bunch of chip sanction, chip control legislation that could be expanded, reworked, changed. There's also... I mean, the incentive is just so high. We've heard about people taking hair dryers and removing labels from servers to get them across the... Across borders. It's a... It's an extremely valuable... [00:21:40] S2: That was called super micro. I think
00:21:40 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[00:21:40] S2: That was called super micro. I think [00:21:42] S0: it was super micro. But anytime that there's these geopolitical walls, there's just such an incentive for arbitrage. I remember hearing about people that in the Russia Ukraine war would take basically, like, a first class fight to a western democracy, buy a DJI drone at, like, a Best Buy for a thousand dollars or buy a bunch of them, put them in their suitcase, fly them into the closest country, hop on a train or a bus, get into the conflict zone, and be able to sell them for, like, $10,000 apiece. And so that arbitrage is just like, okay. One trip, five ten drones, I mean, I make a 100... I make $90,000 in profit. Yeah. People do that. It's the same thing with with NVIDIA GPUs. So there's going to be an incent... A huge incentive not just to steal them and divert the cargo and do whatever you can, but also get close to the CEO, see what you can do, learn what is their actual process for making sure that chips aren't diverted. Right? How how can we mitigate the diversion as much as possible or divert as much as possible. Right? And so it's an ongoing ongoing battle. But another another example of the the the high geopolitical stakes of the AI race is this the moment that AI 2027 was talking about. China wakes up. Wakes up and starts spying, like starts going more aggressively. Wouldn't [00:23:05] S2: that... They've they've been doing [00:23:06] S0: this for couple of years then. Yeah. Yeah. This is The New York Times wakes up. New York Times wakes up to what's going on with the with the geopolitical spying.