China is building its own Nvidia – and US trade policy is forcing their hand!

Summary

In this All-In clip, host Jason Calacanis questions guest investor Gavin Baker about newly expanded US export controls covering companies in the Nvidia ecosystem. Baker argues the controls are extremely hard to police, since a Blackwell GPU is far more valuable per unit than the illegal drugs the US already fails to intercept, but that the friction still buys America an advantage at the cost of pushing China to build its own semiconductor ecosystem and innovate algorithmically, as DeepSeek showed. He puts the odds of China matching or beating Nvidia within five years at about zero, while conceding a ten-year horizon is open because Beijing plans in decades. The discussion then moves to AI agents, where Baker expects Anthropic's model context protocol to become a standard, sees very high ROI on AI capex and Blackwell if agents scale, and identifies available compute as the binding constraint.

• New export-control additions target quantum computing and much of the Nvidia GPU ecosystem
• Baker: policing GPU smuggling is harder than stopping drugs given value per unit
• Chips are routed through Singapore, Vietnam and other intermediaries; cat-and-mouse until a grand bargain
• Export controls create an immense incentive for China to build a domestic semiconductor ecosystem
• DeepSeek cited as proof of Chinese algorithmic innovation under hardware constraints
• Odds of China matching Nvidia in five years seen as near zero; ten years is open
• Model context protocol from Anthropic, adopted by OpenAI, expected to become the agent standard
• Compute is the rate-limiting factor for agents; OpenAI's $2,000-$20,000 monthly pricing shows scarcity