00:33:01 · Akash Pasricha
[00:33:01] S0: Great. Well, I want to thank you both for coming on. Leo, stick around for a minute as well because I want to talk about a story that you published as well today. That is Shane Burke, our senior data journalist here at The Information, and Leo Schwartz, our tech and politics reporter here in our newsroom. Awesome. Thanks, Akash. Whichever way the midterms go, Jensen Huang will still be pushing hard to keep his relationship sharp with everyone in Washington, DC. Several reporters in our newsroom joined forces on a new feature story that highlights how Jensen has built such a strong political capital behind the scenes. I want to bring on Leo Schwartz and Phoebe Liu to share more about their reporting. Welcome to the both of you. It is great to have you here. Phoebe, I want to start with you because you and our colleagues did a ton of great reporting here on this issue from all different angles. There's the policy angle, there's the NVIDIA angle, there's the think tank angle, there's also the OpenAI angle. And the story starts with a Slack exchange that you and our colleagues got ahold of. What was this Slack message that really perked our ears here at The Information?
00:34:13 · Phoebe Liu, Akash Pasricha
[00:34:13] S5: Yeah. So last month, senior OpenAI research scientist, Noam Brown, sent another news article around kind of a perception that OpenAI had softened its stance on chip exports, specifically advanced AI chip exports to China, and kind of asked what is our policy on export controls. And kind of the response to that was a little bit tenuous, kind of pointing at previous things that OpenAI had published saying, okay. The company supports export controls generally, but not specifying, like, certain hardware or certain countries like China. And our colleague Steph had some reporting basically also saying that internally, some OpenAI policy people had said, oh, like, we've maybe softened some of our stances on export controls, maybe for fear of angering NVIDIA and specifically its CEO, Huang. [00:35:11] S0: And so this is kind of interesting because the fear of Jensen Huang is kind of the through line here. That is what we really reported on. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, what's going on here? Why are they... I mean, they just want chips? Is that the idea?
00:35:11 · Akash Pasricha, Phoebe Liu, Leo Schwartz
[00:35:11] S0: And so this is kind of interesting because the fear of Jensen Huang is kind of the through line here. That is what we really reported on. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. I mean, what's going on here? Why are they... I mean, they just want chips? Is that the idea? [00:35:33] S5: I mean, NVIDIA's biggest lever, of course, is its ability to decide who gets how many chips, because everyone wants more chips from NVIDIA than they can get. NVIDIA, of course, has, over many, many occasions, denied that they kind of explicitly use this as a lever, but that doesn't mean the fear is not still there. Like, anything that a company can do to even create the perception that they might be able to get more chips from NVIDIA is a good thing, and I think that effectively gives NVIDIA even more sway over its biggest customers and partners. [00:36:12] S0: Leo, And, as you think about this, there's the interviews that Jensen gives in which he's quite loud about this, but then there's what he's doing behind the scenes, I guess. And this was some of the more interesting reporting we did. How has he been sort of waging this power behind the scenes? [00:36:32] S4: Yeah. I mean, this was a fun story because we really got to trace the history of NVIDIA becoming a DC company. And, you know, I I think people forget that just a few years ago, it was a much smaller gaming chip company before it became the chief allocator of the the AI revolution. So during the early Biden years [00:36:51] S0: title.
00:36:51 · Akash Pasricha, Leo Schwartz
[00:36:51] S0: title. [00:36:52] S4: In the early Biden year or the... In the Biden years before the export controls, NVIDIA didn't have that much of a presence in DC. But then when Biden started doing these export controls on ships to China, NVIDIA built up its government affairs team in DC and started getting a reputation for having very sharp elbows within the Biden administration, on the hill, in think tanks, really exerting its influence. And, you know, that's not abnormal for companies to do, but NVIDIA became the richest, and I guess now the second richest, company in the world. So obviously, it was able to hold more attention than I think other companies who tried the same game. [00:37:29] S0: Right. Know, Phoebe, when you look at this, I mean, is kind of interesting because NVIDIA is at this point now where it's actually not as favorited, I guess, as you could say. I guess in the last couple of weeks, we've seen maybe some government officials, including the president, maybe soften his unconditional support, at least a little bit for the company. Just walk us through a little bit what's going on here.
00:37:59 · Phoebe Liu, Akash Pasricha
[00:37:59] S5: Yeah. So last week, The New York Times published a very well reported story saying that Jensen had a close relationship with this Chinese business executive who had at some point been affiliated with a NVIDIA customer in Singapore that was under investigation for potentially skirting export controls and smuggling advanced NVIDIA chips to China. And The Times reported that the government had found or believed that that relationship possibly had a direct line into Beijing, and thought that Jensen might be the target of some kind of spy plot. It's unclear if any information actually did pass. That would be pretty, crazy. If so, we don't have evidence of that. But I think that's kind of a piece of the broader picture kind of undergirding all of this. And as far as Trump's comments go, over the weekend, he was basically saying, like, okay. Like, I still have full faith in him right now. Like, previously, I'd been briefed on this thing and, like, didn't take any action. And this time around, it seemed to suggest that he was going to look into it again. He was like, I have full faith in Jensen, like, unless or until we find something to the contrary. [00:39:17] S0: Right. Right. Leo, another stakeholder in this is how NVIDIA has been working with think tanks, I guess, in these advocacy groups? What do we know about those relationships?
00:39:17 · Akash Pasricha, Leo Schwartz
[00:39:17] S0: Right. Right. Leo, another stakeholder in this is how NVIDIA has been working with think tanks, I guess, in these advocacy groups? What do we know about those relationships? [00:39:32] S4: Yeah. I mean, we kept hearing in the course of this reporting that NVIDIA, in response to export controls, that limited powerful advanced AI chips going to China would have different arguments. One, that the Chinese chips didn't really have that different of capability or that chip smuggling wasn't actually that much of an issue. One of the most powerful players in the DC world is think tanks, which put out their own scholarship, but they often have a blurred line with donors like Nvidia who provide financing to them. Like publications, think tanks often purport to have editorial independence. But what we found out and kept hearing examples of was scholars at these think tanks putting out policy papers that were very in favor of export controls, and then the think tank getting very angry emails from NVIDIA's government affairs staff critiquing the papers or dangling the threat of their funding and their donations. So we have a lot of reporting about that in the story about how NVIDIA would express the displeasure and sometimes tie that with the money they were giving to the think tank, again, to show how they were influencing these policy discussions that were happening in D. C. Around export controls.