🏛️ Nvidia's Asia revenue is diverted China demand

“About 47% of all of Nvidia's revenue goes to China and Chinese related countries. And I think when you peel back this onion, I think what you will find is a whole raft of companies that were stood up to buy these Nvidia GPUs to essentially act as a way station for China.”

“So there have been attempts to set up shell companies to circumvent the export controls. And it is a very big problem.”

“Taiwan and Vietnam do not have the need for that many domestically. They're obviously flipping them to someone, right?”

“after we spoke about Nvidia, the Nvidia team reached out to me. And they were like, hey, Chamath, here's a bunch of stuff that will help you unpack what you spoke about in a little bit more detail. ... And what these guys educated me on is that they've been trying to refine how this is described, but it's not what it seems, meaning they report revenue on what's called the billing or the invoicing address. ... So it turns out that that's actually not where the silicon gets shipped. So there's a Singaporean office that handles the invoicing. So then I said, well, who are these companies that are using these places? And it turns out that it's a bunch of major US companies, including US OEMs and Clouds, that use Singapore for invoicing their suppliers.”

“This idea that somehow they're going to get smuggled, it's like this totally fake concern that's been created. It's almost like a totally fake narrative.”

“That makes no sense. These guys have unlimited resources. They have unlimited ambition. That's just a naive point of view. They want these for themselves.”