On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti A strange turn in the AI chip race with China
10 snips
Jan 9, 2026 Paolo Kavao, a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Matt Sheehan from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace dive into the intrigue of NVIDIA's AI chip sale to China. They discuss the implications for national security and U.S.-China tech competition. Paolo highlights the risks of increased government involvement, while Matt argues for limiting GPU exports to prevent military enhancements. They also address the fragility of supply chains, the importance of U.S. manufacturing investment, and the challenges posed by restrictive visa policies for attracting AI talent.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
NVIDIA's Business Motive For The H200 Deal
- NVIDIA pushed the H200 sale to China because China is a massive market and the company wants growth despite political risk.
- The H200 is about six times more powerful than the H20 and currently exceeds Chinese domestic equivalents.
Two Competing Strategies On Export Controls
- Policymakers debate whether selling advanced chips helps the U.S. control standards or simply arms a rival.
- One view: diffusion of U.S. tech can extend American influence the way Huawei spread telecoms globally.
Why GPUs Power Modern AI
- AI's core advantage is running many parallel computations, enabling tasks far faster than CPUs.
- Jensen Huang explained GPUs compute tens of thousands of threads simultaneously, powering large AI models.