Kyrgyzstan is Central Asia’s island of democracy…relatively speaking. As a mountainous, landlocked state without oil or gas endowments, the country faces a difficult development path. Yet, Kyrgyzstan’s GDP has grown at a rate of 9% every year since 2022, and unemployment recently reached a record low of 1.6%. In the capital city of Bishkek, there is an air of optimism, national pride, and commitment to economic growth of the sort I’ve only ever felt before in Poland — and partnerships with China are an important part of that story.

This month, I (Lily, ChinaTalk’s lead editor) spent some time exploring Kyrgyzstan and speaking with locals about Chinese influence in their country. Here are my reflections.

Setting the Scene

Bishkek is a green city full of trees and flower gardens. The preferred colors for front doors and other infrastructure seem to be sky blue and sea foam green, which complement the natural landscape nicely. An exception to this trend is the fleet of “Comfort”-class taxis, which are pale orange models purchased from Korea. The summer weather is mild, and the parks are full of little children laughing and enjoying the long days. Most restaurants have super comfortable chairs with thick, bouncy cushions.

Possibly my favorite thing about the city is the abundance of 24/7 flower shops — you know, for when your event needs a midnight flower supplement, or when you need to prove your dedication to a dance partner with a bouquet.

China x Kyrgyzstan

In Kyrgyzstan’s largest cities, Bishkek and Osh, there are construction sites everywhere, usually operating with Chinese or Korean equipment, and often financed with Belt and Road loans. Notable works in progress include a new transnational highway, regional airports, a BYD factory, and the largest ski resort in Central Asia (opening winter 2026!).

After Kyrgyzstan joined the BRI in 2013, opinion polls year after year showed that Kyrgyz people were skeptical of China’s economic influence, though they welcomed economic engagement with Russia, their former colonizer. That began to change in 2022 — positive feelings toward China proliferated rapidly in the booming post-pandemic economy. By 2023, a large majority of the Kyrgyz public supported new Chinese investments in their country, according to polling conducted by the Central Asia Barometer. Those surveys (as well as Gallup polling) indicate that educated people and individuals with higher incomes are especially favorable toward China, a trend that also held in neighboring Kazakhstan.

This data indicates that people are seeing, or expect to see, real benefits from dealing with China. Already, the Ala Archa National Park has its own fleet of Chinese-made electric buses to shuttle hikers into the park, and the city of Bishkek has purchased hundreds of Zhongtong buses from China in the hopes of reducing traffic jams and air pollution.1 (This is a noble effort, but traffic is still quite bad. What Bishkek really needs is a metro.)

Still, even as people support Chinese investment, trade, and technology, they continue to feel negatively about Chinese workers in their country. To make sense of this disconnect, we have to understand that Moscow bombarded Central Asia with propaganda about a looming Chinese invasion for decades following the Sino-Soviet split. Remember that there was active combat on the border between Kazakhstan and Xinjiang during the undeclared 1969 Sino-Soviet war.2

The Kyrgyz government caps work permits for foreigners at about 15,000, and 75% of these permits go to Chinese workers. That doesn’t sound like much, but to quote Bruce Pannier of Radio Free Europe, this represents “the biggest influx of an outside group since independence.”

Three protests against Chinese laborers broke out in Bishkek between December 2018 and January 2019, incited also by the news that the Chinese government was detaining ethnically Kyrgyz people in Xinjiang.3 While only around 500 people attended the largest of these protests, the unrest sparked a national conversation when 21 protesters were arrested.

In the months following the protests, government officials worked to dispel anti-China sentiment in preparation for a state visit by Xi Jinping, including by speaking to the press about the protests and publishing evidence disproving rumors of mass illegal immigration (and of Chinese leftover men seeking Kyrgyz brides). In the words of Carnegie’s Temur Umarov, Central Asians “don’t fear China per se — they fear that their own elites are not loyal to the national interest, but loyal to their own cynical interests.” Today, sentiment surrounding Chinese immigrants is improving, but their favorability is still underwater.

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In Central Asia, Belt and Road projects are mostly staffed by local people. Apart from the cap on work visas, imported Chinese labor is far more expensive than hiring locally. Instead, Chinese immigrants mostly work in technical or managerial roles, where they oversee and, crucially, train large teams of Kyrgyz employees. So, the vast majority of China’s economic impact in the region comes in the form of completed infrastructure, employment opportunities, and cheap consumer goods — not from the presence of Chinese people on the ground. As Chinese companies increasingly outsource operations to cheaper pastures, Belt and Road investments represent a platform for future business partnerships.

The Chinese workers I met in Bishkek had come to Kyrgyzstan to mine precious metals, to open restaurants, or to import Chinese goods to sell at local markets. (I visited three of these markets — Dordoi, Osh, and Madina. Dordoi was my favorite by a wide margin.) None of the Chinese people I met could speak Russian, much less Kyrgyz.

The Chinese food I had in Bishkek was pretty good, as far as international Chinese food goes. Upscale Chinese restaurants are quite trendy, usually serving photogenic versions of classic dishes with a local spin. There are also more authentic Chinese restaurants where the vast majority of customers are Chinese immigrants.

Travel Notes

Central Asia has disproportionately high fertility for its level of development. Some people attribute this to increasing religiousness after the fall of the Soviet Union. Anecdotally, I didn't observe mothers covering their hair at a higher rate than the general female population. In any case, large, close-knit families are culturally the norm and Kyrgyz weddings usually have 500-1000 guests!

Physical fitness seems really important in the national consciousness. I arrived on the same flight as the Kyrgyz national wrestling team, who were returning from an international competition and were welcomed by hundreds of people at the airport at 5 am. The national sport is kok boru, which is like soccer, except instead of kicking a ball into a goal, the players ride horses and compete to throw a 90lb (40kg) dead goat into an elevated pit.

Grocery stores sell a truly staggering array of sweets, as well as a diverse range of dairy and meat products. They don’t offer many fresh vegetables, but there is usually a counter where you can order tasty premade salads. My favorite was the “Caucasus salad” that comes with beef.

I spent a week in Bishkek, which wasn't nearly enough time to explore all the beautiful landscapes and historical sites around the city. My favorite excursion was a hiking trip to Konorchek canyon. I had a fantastic guide named Chinggis (who is now ChinaTalk’s second listener in Kyrgyzstan) — I laughed, I cried, and learned a ton about Kyrgyzstan’s democratic revolutions! People in general were so friendly and helpful, and they seemed to really care whether I was having a good time in their country. They even complimented my Russian skills — which never happens when I’m talking to Russian people.

Finally, Kyrgyzstan is very good at sunsets. Here’s my favorite:

大家好，今天周日，说点轻松的。

人活在这个世界上，离不开三样东西：阳光、空气，还有钱。阳光和空气，大自然免费供应，但我们生活中的其他几乎所有东西，都要花钱来买。每个人的生活，都离不开钱。看一个人的能力怎么样，人品怎么样，有时候会看走眼，但是只要你有机会看他对钱的态度，看他怎么样处理钱的问题，往往会看得很准。

这几十年，我们中国人对钱的态度，发生了巨变。我们年轻的时候，有部很火的电视连续剧，叫《编辑部的故事》。现在看来，那个剧发挥了生活启蒙的作用。其中有句台词，“钱不是万能的，但没钱是万万不能的。”这句简单的大白话，成了后面三十多年整个中国社会的共识。

这句话说出了一个朴素的道理。大家为了谋生，为了更好的生活，都要去挣钱。而要挣钱，我们大部分人就要去工作。但问题是，一天只有24小时，除去吃饭、睡觉、娱乐、谈情说爱、处理各种杂事，真正能用来工作的时间非常有限。无论是8小时，10小时，还是996，都有一个生理和物理极限。

所以，人们都希望能在有限的时间内，尽量多挣点钱。这就引出了一个我们每个人，从填报高考志愿到选择职业道路，都必须面对的重要问题：学什么专业，干什么职业，才能挣钱比较多？美国医生收入高，很多老中家长喜欢让孩子念医学院。但不是每个人都有条件念医学院。

今天早晨，起来看CNBC，这是家以播报财经、商业新闻为主的媒体。看到一个很吸引眼球的标题“30-year-old makes over $300,000 a year in a hospital—without going to med school“（“年仅30岁，没念过医学院，却在医院挣到年薪30万美元”。这是个普通女孩子的故事，讲她怎么样规划自己的职业，花最少钱，念性价比最高的学校和专业，工作后怎么样掌握职业主动权，怎么样及早获得财务自由的故事。

这个女孩子的故事很长知识，也很励志。看完以后，我临时决定，录期节目，跟大家分享。

一个普普通通的年轻人，刚刚30岁，年薪超过30万美元，换算成人民币大约210万。能挣到这个年薪，即使在美国，也妥妥进入了高收入群体。更关键的一点是，她没有去念让很多学生背上巨额贷款的医学院、法学院，也没有去念MBA。她念了一个短平快的硕士。

这个故事的主人公，名叫Chabely Rodriguez。她的故事，就像一个精心设计的人生剧本，充满了智慧、规划和执行力。下面，我们就来剖析这个故事，看看普通人，普通人家的孩子，能从她的经历中，学到哪些人生经验。

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为什么他被誉为“最善良的法官”？｜法律是为了惩罚，还是救赎？他用一生给出了答案｜法律的天平与人性的天平｜从水果小贩的儿子到享誉世界的法官｜In Loving Memory of Judge Frank Caprio (1936-2025)

前天，一位美国法官去世了。这两天，线上线下，无数人在悼念他。不只是美国人悼念他，世界各地的人都悼念他；不只是法律界悼念他，很多社会底层的普通人，也在悼念他。

美国历史上，还没有一位法官去世后，有这么多人悼念。他不是美国最高法院的大法官，而是罗德岛一位市政法院的普通法官。这是美国司法系统中是最基层的法院。

人们怀念他，人们悼念他，不是因为他是最厉害的法官，而是因为他是“最善良的法官”。他就是Frank Caprio法官。他在罗德岛的普罗维登斯市政法院做了38年法官。他每天审理的不是大案要案，而是些交通罚单、停车违章之类的小案子。

说到这里，听众可能会问，为什么一个在地方基层法院审理小微案件的普通法官，能获得这么高的声誉，被世界各地无数人爱戴？为什么他的离去，让那么多人素昧平生的人，感觉像失去了亲人一样？

一位悼念他的网友说出了答案：“在这个日益冷漠和分裂的世界上，他用法槌，敲响了人性的钟声。”

几年前，Caprio法官得了胰腺癌，做完化疗后，CBS电视网一位记者去访谈他。他比在法庭上穿着法官袍审理案子的时候，更谦卑。他说：“我只是一位普普通通的地方法院法官，尽力做善事。仅此而已。我尽力去体谅站在法庭上的每个人，他们都有各自的处境。我记得父亲对我说的话：有人站在你面前，要将心比心，设身处地为他们着想。你就想象一下，如果换成是你站在那里，你希望法官怎么对待你？”

他不只是一位判案的法官，也是一位教授理性、责任和人间常识的老师，一位传播悲悯、尊严和希望的布道者。

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Are GPUs being smuggled into China? Nvidia says no. But Steve Burke, editor in chief of Gamers Nexus, has traced out the entire smuggling chain in an epic three-hour YouTube documentary. Earlier this year, he also he filmed another masterpiece of independent journalism exploring the impact of tariffs on America’s gaming computer ecosystem.

In today’s conversation, we discuss…

• Steve’s investigative process, including how he found people in mainland China willing to speak on the record about black market GPUs,

• The magnitude of smuggling, weaknesses in enforcement, and crudeness of US restrictions,

• China’s role in manufacturing GPUs they aren’t allowed to buy,

• And what it takes to stand up to Nvidia as an independent journalist.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

As of August 21st, YouTube has removed the full documentary via DCMA.

Having watched the entire documentary, I can confirm this video had zero business getting struck. GamersNexus is working on getting the video back on YouTube, but you can watch it here in the meantime.

From Craigslist to Shenzhen

Jordan Schneider: Steve, you are a madman. What motivated you to try to trace the GPU smuggling supply chain from the US into China?

Steve Burke: Honestly, I saw a Reuters story a couple of years ago about the concept of a GPU black market, and that concept is dystopian, cyberpunk, and weird. It’s really compelling because you normally don’t think of something that was historically used for playing video games as being marketable on a black market. That’s what started it.

We sat in the background for a couple years, and then this year, with all the policy changes, it came up naturally. Plus, Nvidia almost seemed to be inviting a response with their whole “smuggling doesn’t happen and it’s a non-starter” stance.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah, at one point they’re writing blog posts saying no one’s smuggling GPUs, while there are photos from the Hong Kong Police Department — DEA-style shots of captured CPUs instead of drugs, smuggled with fake pregnancy baby bumps or by packing the CPUs with live lobsters. It’s an interesting communication style that was so strident it attracted moths to the flame of incredibly ambitious YouTubers. How does one start reporting something like this?

Steve Burke: The concept of the story was simple — there are GPUs that are not permitted for sale into China by United States companies, but they’re getting there anyway. We wanted to find out how.

Our tariffs video introduced a new style where we flew around and spoke to people affected by the issue. Instead of writing the story around the information we gathered, we ran their discussions mostly unedited and learned a lot from it. We thought it would be great to go out to China and talk to people involved in GPU smuggling to see what they’d say.

I spent a lot of time looking for people to talk to, collecting research, and figuring out who the key players were. At some point, I decided we just had to pull the trigger and get on a plane.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting because there’s nothing illegal in China about bringing banned GPUs into the country — they’re not banned there. There’s this weird dynamic where these people aren’t criminals in the PRC. If they were, they probably wouldn’t be speaking to a Western journalist. You found this gray area where someone was buying RTX 4090s on Craigslist in the US and shipping them off by flying to Hong Kong and China. Connecting that full chain was really remarkable. Walk us through some of the steps.

Steve Burke: The hardest part of putting together a story where you’re relying on people to explain their part of the chain — and we wanted them to explain it themselves, not through me — was finding the first person.

We found Dr. Vinci Chow, who works at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He was referenced in an old Reuters story, and I emailed him. From there, I was able to ask him about the steps involved. He couldn’t reveal his sources or supply chain for how he buys export-controlled GPUs, but he pointed us in the right direction to find people ourselves.

The first step was crawling through Alibaba listings. As stupid as that sounds, I typed in the names of banned GPUs into Alibaba, and they’re everywhere. I started messaging people, always telling them, “We want to make a video. I’ll buy a card if I have to, as long as you talk to me.” A lot of them responded with confusion, asking if I actually wanted to buy something or not. But we found a couple people who were game for it.

The two main sources we found were basically middlemen for these GPUs in China. Both of them wanted to be involved because they were curious about how Western media works — they wanted to see the process.

From there, the next step was taking it further. We had the user — Dr. Vinci Chow, who uses these GPUs — and someone representing the middlemen. What we really needed were the people supplying the middlemen, which would be the smugglers we found. We also needed anyone else in the chain who might be modifying cards or exchanging them in another middle process.

Basically, we broke down the supply chain into categories and needed to find one person for each category to follow a GPU from start to finish. That was the goal.

Jordan Schneider: There are a lot of fun, colorful personalities you met along the way. Why don’t you give some profiles? We start with the university professor who’s maybe the easiest to picture — he’s just teaching his students and has three or four A100s. Not an enormous national security risk, in my humble opinion, but you start upping the level of sketchy characters.

Steve Burke: First, it’s important to point out that at no point did I feel unsafe with any of these people. I was at an Asian grocery store a couple days after publishing this, and someone from China who was visiting ran up to me. The first thing he said was, “Oh my God, this seems so dangerous!” I think that’s the common conception, but we never felt unsafe with anybody.

They were all very interesting characters. The sketchiest guy would have been the person in the US from China who buys export-controlled devices from Americans through normal Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace sales. Then he gets them back to China to collect a profit. He was the only one where — I’m not versed in criminal law — but I’m pretty sure he was definitely breaking laws.

The middle people we worked with in China, who sit between the users and the smugglers, basically buy from people in the US. It was amusing talking to this one guy, Vincent. He’s basically a solo operator running a trading company. He doesn’t care about GPUs or any of the stuff he sells — he just knows it makes money. He can buy it, sell it, and make money.

Jordan Schneider: Yeah.

Steve Burke: He didn’t even know which cards were banned and which weren’t. In the video, he asked me, “Is the RTX 5090 banned or not?” I said it was banned, and he replied, “But you can just buy them on the market.” It was baffling to him — they’re right there, so how are they banned?

Jordan Schneider: Those visuals are incredible — you’re just in a room with walls of these GPUs.

One of the big takeaways for me is that yes, fentanyl is banned in America, but there’s still a lot of fentanyl in America. There are millions and millions of these GPUs made, so it’s not shocking that there’s some leakage. The fact that there are enough of these people out there for Steve to build a whole story around it — and as someone who has tried and failed for years to get mainland guests to come on shows with me in either English or Chinese — you have to imagine an enormous iceberg under this little thing you were able to capture on camera. What other indications did you get of the magnitude of this?

Steve Burke: One of the better examples was the repair shop. It’s just a repair shop that fixes video cards. They’re not formally involved in any black market — they’re not intentionally part of some illicit market. They just fix GPUs, and as part of that, they happen to fix export-controlled GPUs that are on what the US would consider a black market.

This was really interesting because it didn’t click for me until I got home and started editing. The repair shop owner talks about how he modifies these GPUs to increase memory capacity and make them more viable for AI users. What I picked up on was that it’s keeping export-controlled silicon in circulation.

Normally, the part that dies on a video card isn’t the silicon itself or the GPU — those are super resilient. It’s usually a MOSFET or a capacitor that costs three cents to replace. In the US, these types of shops that can modify memory are relatively uncommon. I don’t know of a single one, though there might be someone out there.

The point is that in China, if this silicon is export-controlled and there’s restricted flow into the country, you have these shops that can keep devices in service through no illicit intent of their own. They’re just repair shops making money. That’s really interesting because you can see how it prevents their supply from diminishing when devices go out of service due to something fixable breaking.

Jordan Schneider: Playing Nvidia rep hat here with some critiques — there are a handful of gaming PCs slightly above the thresholds, but the things folks are more worried about are accelerators and full racks. You have quotes from Jensen and David Sacks saying these things are really big and heavy — how could anyone smuggle them? What’s your take on that line?

Steve Burke: He said something about not being able to fit a Grace Blackwell system in your pocket. It was a brilliant misdirection for someone who doesn’t really understand the device he’s talking about, because there are a few problems with that.

First, you don’t need the device in China to use it — you can remote into it somewhere else. The problem with that approach is the data is remote, so processing is slow. If they have a lot of data and really need it on-premises, then you would still want to get it in country.

One of the companies we found and spoke to in Taiwan is basically a testing firm. What they do is bring devices on behalf of other companies, test them, clear or screen them, then forward them to the company that hired them to test the device. Maybe they’re testing a server rack or cooling solution to make sure it’s sufficient before forwarding it.

These types of companies can also work to forward export-controlled racks. The one Jensen was talking about in that video — yeah, you can’t fit it in your pocket, but you can fit it in a crate and ship it from Taiwan.

From what we saw, it happens. We weren’t allowed to film this part, but we were in a room where they had Grace Blackwell systems just sitting there. I asked, “Where are these going?” The response was, “China — there’s a company that hired us, and we’re sending them to China when we’re done testing.” He thought nothing of it, as if he wasn’t revealing some big secret.

Jordan Schneider: The stuff you got on camera was more small-scale operators, but it makes sense that this larger-scale smuggling is happening. This is a desirable product, after all.

The thing that’s different with fentanyl is that it’s illegal in America, so you have domestic law enforcement making it harder for gangs and cartels — they have to get creative, creating a cat-and-mouse game. But if the destination for the black market goods is outside the export-controlling country, and the rest of the world doesn’t care, then it’s much easier once this stuff leaves the US. Tens of billions of dollars of this product ships every year.

Particularly when we don’t have systematic tracking — there was this Reuters article that seemed like a deep state warning saying they put tracking devices on things, but you don’t really have systematic tracking. What I assume is happening is the DOJ is building a handful of cases against these smuggler people, not a systematic effort to track tens of billions of dollars.

Steve Burke: Especially because most of these devices are made in China. Almost all of them are manufactured there, so the DOJ isn’t at the end of the factory line putting trackers on products. It would have to be somewhere else — maybe at Nvidia’s warehouse or whoever handles their logistics locally.

It’s definitely possible, but I think a lot of this stuff isn’t distributed through a chain that would ever be intercepted by the DOJ. If a factory in China is assembling an accelerator and “oops,” this accelerator has a defect, it’s not going to America — it’s going in the bin. What happens after it gets in that bin is unclear.

In at least one instance, we found that with the university’s accelerators, it appeared that an accelerator with a defect was assembled from other components kept from other defective units or spares. It’s almost naive to think that every one of these devices has to go through an export flow through the US that would be trackable by the US or Nvidia. Stuff can just disappear.

Jordan Schneider: The packaging happens in China. What sort of level of involvement does China have in the process?

Steve Burke: The assembly process works this way — Nvidia designs the silicon (done all over the world, but they’re headquartered in California), and TSMC manufactures and fabricates the silicon in Taiwan. Then, Chinese companies manufacture — and sometimes engineer through contract — the cooling solutions, the PCB (printed circuit board), and source all the capacitors and voltage regulator components. Everything that makes one of these devices — pretty much everything — is sourced in China.

They bring it to a factory that assembles it on an assembly line, typically with automated machines called SMT lines (surface mount technology lines). These pick and place thousands of components down the line, with some manual assembly of the heat sink, and then it comes out the other side. They box it and ship it if it’s going to retail, or if it’s something going on a server, it’s simply shipped to the next location.

The assembly locations act as collection or aggregation points for everything else. The company that assembles the video card receives components from at least dozens of other factories. The company that puts that accelerator or video card into a server is itself receiving components from dozens of factories. They assemble it, and from there it should go out to whoever the customer is, which is often Nvidia.

Jordan Schneider: This needs to sink in for people. There are server racks which the US government — even the Trump administration — has decided are too powerful, too dual-use, too scary to give China access to. But we still need Chinese firms to make these things.

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Steve Burke: Yes, but they’re not allowed to have the thing that they make. It’s very interesting. I tried to drive this home in the video — it’s a black market from the US perspective. The people we spoke to in China see it as just the market.

The guy Vincent we spoke to in his small shop — we asked him, “Does China care? Does the Chinese government care?” His answer was essentially that it’s none of China’s business. They don’t have a reason to care about what he’s buying or that America thinks it should be export-controlled. As a small business owner, he doesn’t have any control over it anyway. If it’s on the market, he buys it. If someone wants it, he sells it. It’s really that simple.

Jordan Schneider: Then there’s the question of where Nvidia fits in all this. Clearly they’d like to sell as much as they can, but they also don’t want to literally break the law. I thought it was very funny that you had four or five different interviewees basically hit you with the same Chinese idiom.

Steve Burke: “Open one eye and close the other (睁一只眼闭一只眼).” Yeah, they all said that. The question I asked pretty much everyone was, “Does Nvidia know, and do you think they care to control it?” The answer was that they just turn a blind eye.

I do think there’s truth to that. Jensen’s on camera one day denying this is a thing, talking about how it’s a non-starter because some smugglers got arrested. But then you look at it — well, they made tens of millions of dollars, according to the DOJ, before they were arrested. Is it really a non-starter? That much money is a pretty good starter.

Jordan Schneider: That’s a pretty good starter, and these are the stupidest ones.

Steve Burke: Yes, these are the ones who got caught. Exactly.

Jordan Schneider: I just asked ChatGPT, and it said that Blackwells are mostly assembled outside of China. But the RTX 5000 series — are those the ones you’re referencing?

Steve Burke: We could talk about that. It depends on what they mean by assembly, because Blackwell includes RTX 5090s, which are assembled in China — a lot of them. A lot of Hopper is done in China. The GB — I’m not 100% sure where Grace Blackwell systems are all assembled, but I know for a fact that some of Nvidia’s largest partners for manufacturing and assembling the boards we’re talking about are in China. The RTX 5090s most certainly are.

Jordan Schneider: Gotcha. Just to close the loop on this — we had Chris Miller and Leonard Lerer on last week. Leonard was pounding the table on the idea that if we want this to happen and we’ve decided it’s okay for China to get GPUs, let’s keep doing the playbook we have now where you can have cloud access in Singapore and Malaysia. There’s a little lag, but you can train all your models. It’s easier to see if someone’s doing something sketchy if it’s happening in Malaysia versus in a data center in western China. If the world really goes to shit, it’s much easier to turn those off if they’re in another country than if they’re already in the PRC.

ChinaTalk

EMERGENCY POD: H20 Drama

We’re bringing back Lennart Heim of RAND and Chris Miller author of Chip Wars and newly on substack, to discuss the new H20 drama, when exports were banned in April, and now selling it with a 15% export fee…

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13 days ago · 48 likes · Jordan Schneider

Steve Burke: It’s interesting where, with sufficient power, an open market leader also benefits from being the leader of a closed market or black market. If those in charge — Nvidia and the government — decide that access in Singapore, Malaysia, or wherever is safer because it can be toggled or monitored for military use, the interesting byproduct is that it’s creating or fueling this secondary market in China for these devices to be purchased locally.

The most interesting thing to me personally is that we cover this stuff as gaming hardware — DIY PCs that you build to play video games. That’s how it started. What stands out is that gaming users, when they look at content about the product, aren’t trying to figure out how much money they can make from it. They want to buy it and use it to play video games. They’re not making money.

The whole thing has shifted now with AI use cases being so in demand and everybody trying to make a buck off of it. The person at the other end of the product consumption pipeline is trying to figure out how much they can make on this and whether it’s sufficient for the thing they’re trying to use to make money — like an H100 with higher memory capacity.

From my perspective, it feels so much less innocent than where it started with Nvidia’s GPUs, which was about getting high frame rates in Quake or Counter-Strike.

Jordan Schneider: I remember literally talking to people in the White House over the past few years, and they’d say, “We’re not trying to screw over Chinese gamers here. This is not our intention.” But the past 30 years of what Nvidia has built is so odd and happenstance — the thing they’ve been developing happens to enable you to create God as well as render 3D environments.

We’re in this weird moment where the RTX 5090 is marketed and sold as a gaming card, and that is its primary use case. But if you take that technology and put a lot of them together, you can train AI models that can do lots of wonderful things — and also train your AI drone swarms on how to target Taiwanese Marines.

Steve Burke: That’s the other thing that’s interesting — the computing time. One of the points brought up by one of the two professors we spoke to was, “Okay, you’re forcing me to use a slower device, but it can still do it, so I’ll just wait another day or two for that processing.” From the perspective of the US Government, that is still somewhat of the impact they want. If you slow someone down to two days instead of one, that’s a big difference — a 100% increase in processing time.

At the same time, it’s interesting from our vantage point as a more technical outlet — the US government really doesn’t know how to control any of this. They don’t seem to understand how performance is calculated. They don’t use benchmarks that make any sense. If they were to contract someone making YouTube reviews from a bedroom, they might have a better formula for controlling these things.

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Instead, what we get is, “Well, let’s just take the FLOPS from the brochure and multiply it against the bit length of the operation or something and see if that works out.” It seems like they backwards-computed that formula until they restricted the ones they wanted, and then the formula broke when the next generation came out.

The US doesn’t seem to have put the right people on this or done it in the right way to think through the problem. As a technical reviewer, I look at it and wonder: why are we not benchmarking something that considers time to complete, memory capacity, memory bandwidth, and then maybe FLOPS at the end and clock speeds? For whatever reason, that’s not what the formula is.

It blows my mind that it seems so naive to not factor in these other specs on the spec sheet when judging performance, because every application is different.

Jordan Schneider: We should explain who you are and what Gamers Nexus is.

Steve Burke: Generally speaking, we do consumer hardware-facing product reviews and benchmarks — technical analysis of computer components to help people decide whether they should or shouldn’t buy something, whether it’s accurately represented, things like that. We also do consumer advocacy reporting. We’ll take stories about companies screwing over the little guy — warranty denials, things like that.

It’s an advocacy approach where we’ll take a case from a viewer who feels they’ve been wronged by a company, then we’ll take ownership of it and see it through to the end. We try to fix it while also figuring out what went wrong.

On YouTube, we have something like two and a half million subscribers. I started it in 2008 as a website — an article-driven website. Our core team currently has four members, with eight to nine people working on stuff daily.

Tariff Mania and 21st-Century Journalism

Jordan Schneider: All right, tariffs. What was the story you guys tried to tell with that documentary?

Steve Burke: The tariff story was fun because that was a three-hour documentary — our test case for this approach. We got to the GPU story because of the tariff story, where we thought, “All right, that formula worked, let’s try that again."

The way we got to the tariffs story was through conversations I’d already been having with hardware manufacturers who were warning me of price increases. They were trying to figure out how to convey this incoming increase to an audience that would be very upset about it. We were already having those conversations when what I believe was called “Liberation Day” — those tariffs came down.

That was the day I immediately started calling everybody I knew, dating back twelve years in the industry, to see if we could get them on camera to talk about this. Everybody was freaking out because this would potentially mean — in some cases — up to 170% tariffs. It was also starting to target other countries that companies had just started moving to in order to avoid tariffs.

The topic was hot, everybody was upset, and they were willing to go on camera. The problem they ran into was, “We’re going to have to skyrocket the prices on a computer case that should be $90, and customers are going to think we’re gouging them.” In some cases that may be true — that can also happen — but it was just the right moment to try and talk to everyone.

Jordan Schneider: There were two levels that made it such compelling content. First, you had Corsair, but it was mostly small to medium-sized businesses saying, “Oh, Steve’s coming. Let me share a spreadsheet of our future cost structure.” You had these very granular case studies of what the Liberation Day numbers would mean to these companies, as well as the emotional impact of all these conversations.

People forget that when you have a new tariff number, it means an enormous amount of stress on management thinking, “Oh shit, do we need to cancel this buildout? Do these SKUs need to die? Our entire business plan is thrown out the window.” Because this number went from 3% to 50%, down to 20%, up to 25% — and every single one of them repeatedly saying, “There’s absolutely no way I’m building a factory in America. I’m not embarking on a manufacturing renaissance of PCB boards or coolant or decals or whatever, because I’m just trying to stay alive. I’m not trying to plan for the future here."

Steve Burke: Most of these companies don’t own their own factories. Even if they wanted to make products here, that’s not their decision — they don’t have the capital, and the supply chain isn’t here.

Personally, as an individual endeavor, I can take a 3D rendering of a product idea to SEG Market (赛格电子市场) in Huaqiangbei in China, show it to a guy who prints PCBs and a guy who sells capacitors and MOSFETs, and probably have a sample within a couple of days. That doesn’t exist here. That’s a problem if you want to move the supply chain, because you can’t just bring over the end product — you have to bring over all the components that go into it to avoid these tariffs.

For some companies in the story, like Hyte (a small computer case and cooler company), they decided it was easier to halt shipments to the US and move all their advertising and product sales to Germany, England, and anywhere they wouldn’t get hit with these tariffs. They focused on those markets instead.

It ended up creating the opposite of the intended effect — now you’ve got a shortage of products in the US that people really want, and prices are going up due to low supply and tariff concerns.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting — it doesn’t really show up in inflation if the thing doesn’t exist anymore. That was really striking. In the interview, you asked if companies might die from tariffs:

Steve Burke: “Do you think this kills some American companies? Not necessarily anyone’s here at this table.”

Guest: “Oh yeah. This is a high-stress event. This will kill some people.”

Steve Burke: That’s a good point. Even for non-owners — just someone whose job is logistics for a company — if you’re responsible for millions, tens, or hundreds of millions of dollars of product and you’ve got the company breathing down your neck not to screw it up, that’s an enormous amount of stress for something they have very little control over. It comes down to decisions like “Do we take it off the boat or send it back to China?"

Jordan Schneider: Steve, watching you take these big swings and put out two of the most remarkable pieces of journalism I’ve seen this year has been fascinating. You have this deep domain expertise, decades of connections, and experience as a live player building things and seeing the industry evolve. What has the experience been like for you and your team to bite off these stories?

Steve Burke: First, it’s always weird coming off the back of these stories because we post something about black market GPUs and US export control in China, and then in a couple of days I’m going to post a review of a computer case.

One of my friends in the industry recently said to me at a trade show, “What are you doing running around the show floor talking about computer cases?” I still enjoy that stuff — it’s fun for me, easy, and interesting. But for the audience, the biggest thing we have to navigate is that the audience isn’t fully cohesive. It’s not one big mass. You’ve got people who really enjoy these stories and people who really don’t.

What we’ve been trying to do is focus one of our two channels on reviews content. Eventually, a lot of this reporting will probably move over to GN2, which is our consumer advocacy channel. The reason is that YouTube poses a big challenge: if someone subscribed because they enjoy these pieces — tariffs and geopolitical ones — but then they don’t click on anything reviewing a CPU because they don’t care or understand it, YouTube will mark that person as having become disengaged, even if they’re actually just waiting for the content they want.

We’ve been trying to allow the audience to choose if they want one or both types of coverage. That’s been an interesting journey. There’s this background battle people don’t consider — we’re also battling with the YouTube algorithm, which nobody understands. YouTube can’t tell me how it works. They don’t know. They built it and then it went off and became the Terminator.

For the team, it’s been fun because it’s a creative challenge. It’s interesting to talk to all these different experts and learn. At the end of the day, if we want a break from the travel and these stories, we just go review a computer part, and that’s still just as fun.

Jordan Schneider: How do you monetize something like this? It’s an enormous amount of effort to pull one of these together.

Steve Burke: This one was expensive. The travel alone, not counting staff costs, was maybe $15,000. We were overseas for three weeks with a lot of flying around.

For this particular story and most of our funding, it comes from audience support — things like Patreon or our own store where we make computer building products that people can use to help build PCs or other miscellaneous items. That’s the biggest component of our revenue.

Then there’s YouTube AdSense, which is pretty small — those third-party ads that everybody hates and hopefully can skip at the beginning of a video. Finally, there’s direct ad sales where we go to manufacturers directly and offer to sell them an ad for their product, though we didn’t put any of those in this video.

Jordan Schneider: Do you think other corners of your micro-niche are interested or have taken these other swings? How do other folks conceptualize speaking to bigger stories?

Steve Burke: Micro-niche is a good phrase for this. Because we’ve been so historically embedded in benchmarking components and testing video games, a lot of the people I know and respect are in that segment. A couple of the guys I’ll shout out — Hardware Unboxed does excellent benchmarks. He’s talked to me at shows, and the paraphrase of the conversation was more or less, “You can have those stories. I don’t want them.” Fair enough — if you enjoy what you do, then sure.

I don’t think a lot of the people I know directly want to do hardware component-oriented political coverage. No one really wanted to talk about politics in any capacity. I certainly didn’t. I’m on record in a lot of videos in the past saying we’re just reporting on this as hardware-relevant news and keeping all the politics out of this particular story.

As time has gone on and especially as companies like Nvidia have become more relevant to governments, I decided it’s not only not possible to fully separate it anymore — it starts to become almost irresponsible at some point to try to keep separating it because it’s integrated.

A lot of people are just happy to benchmark computer hardware news. This kind of coverage causes a lot of new stresses or problems because you’re potentially stepping on the toes of an audience that’s thinking, “I just watch you because you talk about computer cases. I don’t want to hear you talk about Donald Trump."

Jordan Schneider: The LeBron James “shut up and dribble” mentality. But let’s do a little Steve history — did you work for your high school newspaper? Where did this come from?

Steve Burke: I did. That’s funny, I forgot about that. I also distributed a — God, I was probably 10 or 12 or something — neighborhood newspaper that I wrote for my local area. I forgot about that too until right now.

Jordan Schneider: It’s interesting, the choice to do more political coverage and reporting. There are people like Tim Ferriss who comes to mind — a very popular person who just leaned out of any of this and lost national relevance. You see folks like Joe Rogan or All-In Pod getting much more into this, and the audience excitement and interest for these types of things increasing over time.

Watching the micro-niches I follow — yours and other sports-style coverage — it’s very bifurcated. There are people who have something in their past where they wrote for a high school newspaper and are just into this, and then there are other people who say, “Look, this is not my thing. I enjoy my niche. I don’t want the smoke that comes with it."

Steve Burke: It’s very uncomfortable to get into political stuff. For me, it’s one of those situations where we’ve got a story we think is interesting to everybody, regardless of politics, but we can’t separate it from politics. There’s a chance we piss off someone who we want to come back tomorrow and watch a computer case review. That’s uncomfortable.

It can also be uncomfortable because you’re making some of those people in the audience uncomfortable — maybe they’re confronted with these reviewers now having opinions they don’t agree with about things they don’t think we should talk about. There’s validity to that.

At the same time, I feel our job is to push buttons and be a thorn in the side of big companies. If that means making some people feel a little uncomfortable with this being different — “I don’t know if I enjoy it, but I’ll try it” — that’s kind of where we want to be. We’re saying, “It’s relevant enough. Hear us out. We’ve earned your trust so far. Just hear me out."

Jordan Schneider: There are a few levels to this. One is that you’re coming at this from a consumer advocacy perspective, and you’ve been getting into arguments with Nvidia about warranties and the Bitcoin GPU situation. Having the wherewithal to pick fights with trillion-dollar companies is step one.

From the audience perspective — and let me know if you think I’m practicing what I preach here — authenticity really helps. Look, I voted for Biden and I voted for Kamala. I don’t think anyone who listens to the show is surprised by that. But that’s not what defines this show. What defines this show is that I’m really curious about China and technology. I think this stuff is important and I want to explore these issues.

Coming at it from a place of investigation and curiosity as opposed to strict advocacy — you weren’t starting from the premise that “Trump’s an idiot, let’s use this tariff story to make him look really dumb.” Your premise was, “This is a really big deal for this industry that I cover. I want to show my audience and the world more broadly what these policies are doing to these businesses.” Through that, you had a really fascinating exploration. I’m not worried about you. You’re two for two right now, Steve. It’s going to be fine.

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Steve Burke: I appreciate it. It really helps to let the people you have on just speak. Going into it with the plan of “I’m just going to ask questions and see what they say, and that’s kind of it. I’m not going to push them on their beliefs. I’ll ask more questions maybe, but I don’t really care what this person does or doesn’t believe. I just want to know what they think.”

Then we put it together with all the other stuff people think, and the audience can decide who they agree with. That approach really helps defuse a lot of it, because then you’re just coming up with good topics and going from there.

Jordan Schneider: From my perspective, I do an interview show, not “Jordan talking for an hour.” It’s much more fun for me to learn as opposed to trying to argue with someone or convince them of something. Starting from a place of curiosity is generally a good thing.

By the way, there’s another media aspect worth processing that you mentioned with the government folks — it’s the same with mainstream media reporters. They’re not coming to this having been computer nerds since they were eight years old. They’re coming to this because they were assigned to it — they became a journalist and the Financial Times or Reuters or Wall Street Journal said, “You’re on this beat right now."

The level of connections, sophistication, and specific knowledge that you can bring to these stories is really rich in a way that mainstream media and reporting has a lot going for it, but deep subject matter expertise on the part of the reporters themselves sometimes happens but isn’t really the default. Specifically when you’re talking about stories that have such an industry technical component, being able to tell them through the eyes of someone who really knows their stuff adds another level of sophistication that really shows.

Steve Burke: I used to be worried that this would be a one-hit wonder type of thing — okay, it’s pretty narrow, I happen to overlap with this expertise, but does this happen again? I don’t know. But now, you look at it — Nvidia really is the best example. They are so intertwined with government and Intel now. The government’s talking about buying 10% of AMD, and they’re in the audience for some of these things.

It seems like this line is going to continue to be blurred between tech — especially big tech companies — and government regulation in ways that are still very strange to me. I know the people who are talking to Donald Trump. I’ve met a lot of them in these different briefings, and I know them because they told me how many frames per second their product gets in this video game. Now they’re talking to him about whether this thing should or shouldn’t be banned from another country. It’s very strange still.

Jordan Schneider: It’s such a wild arc. I’m going to refer folks back to the episode on the history of Nvidia I did with Doug O’Laughlin. He was making video cards for gamers — that was 95% of his business for decades. Then crypto gave them this big capital infusion. Jensen was a man with a dream, and it turned out he was right about parallelized computing. He made the best chips in the world, which were able to make GPT-3, and then we’re off to the races.

This is not baked in, and it’s fun for you and for the broader community of people who grew up reading PC Gamer every month, thinking “Oh man, this new chip is so crazy. Let’s see if I can steal money from my parents’ wallet to buy it at CompUSA.” Now this company is probably the most important company in the world.

Steve Burke: Yeah, it’s very bizarre.

Jordan Schneider: Steve, I hear you’ve got a follow-up.

Steve Burke: Yes. The only follow-up I’ve promised to the audience so far is that we will try to find literally anybody in government to interview about GPU export controls. I don’t care who it is, what their viewpoints are, or what state they’re from. We’re trying to find any politician or someone attached to politics — attorney general, whatever — to talk about GPU smuggling, GPU black markets, and export control. We want to understand more of that political viewpoint.

I don’t know who we’ll find. It’s not really the circle I run in.

Jordan Schneider: This seems like a Gamers Nexus–ChinaTalk collaboration opportunity.

Steve Burke: Sure.

Jordan Schneider: More to come on this front. I’m really glad to have you on this beat, Steve. It’s great to have new voices. This is a really important story that has flown under the radar — investors know about it, but this isn’t something your average American has any understanding of. But it’s a big deal, and there are a lot of changes happening. I trust you more than anyone else to tell this story.

Mood Music:

社交媒体上，除了吵吵闹闹，也能学到不少东西，尤其是人生经验，但得从遍地信息垃圾中，甄别出有价值的信息。

昨天上推特，看到一位推友发帖说：“学会说话， 张嘴就给人如沐春风的感觉。 相信我，你的生活不会差。做为一个中年人， 我现在觉得，这是我最需要学习的技能。”这是那位中年推友的话。我早就过了早年，仍然觉得这是个很难得的人生感悟。

我们从中国出来的人，很多“不会说话”，缺少说话的技能。大部分父母不教，学校也不教，各行各业，整个社会，到处是说话粗鲁，不知道怎么跟人交流的男男女女，老老少少。

另一位推友转发了那个帖子，并加上了一段评论，她说“我认同。华人，男性，理工科。中英文语言能力是个大问题，写，说，全有。连带情商，一张口就得罪人。可能是应试教育的副产品。以前是完全是靠学历支撑。现在不说没有用了，但是这几年都看到了，prompts在把人脑可及的流程不断侵蚀。在99.9%同等竞争上，学会说话有绝对的优势。”

看到这段转发的评论，我回应说：“AI时代，谁擅长communication，就是沟通、交流，谁就是赢家。这些年的很多热门技能会被淘汰，但人跟人、人跟机器，包括人跟AI，communication是关键，是永远不会过时的技能。可惜这是中国教育的短板，很多相当聪明的中国毕业生没有这种技能。”

那位转发的推友是理工科背景，但她专门谈到一些理工出身的同行，说他们“张口闭口就骂文科生”，连她自己也被骂过“文科生”。这种现象在网上比较多见，都是些匿名的键盘状元，从小一路做题做到大学毕业，可能还念过研究生、博士，但一出专业，头脑就不太好使了。

英语世界，有些博士自嘲，说博士这个词，就是Ph.D.，意思是Permanent Head Damage（“永久性大脑损伤”）。一些理工科做题家，没念过博士，只念完了本科，就提前患上了“Permanent Head Damage”综合症 。

一些理工科很有成就的朋友，在大学当教授的，在公司做研发的都有，大都读点历史、文学方面的书，很会跟人打交道，很会用家常话跟人交流，在网上，在现实中都很有人缘。从来没有听他们说过文科生如何如何。

文科生、理科生，都有高智商、高情商，性格也很阳光的学生，也都有只学到一点皮毛，就把自己放到鄙视链上端的二货。一般来说，一个人是不是有能力，是不是有智慧，跟他学的专业没有必然联系，但跟他的天赋、悟性、家庭教育，还有努力程度呈正相关。

有些学生本来挺聪明，被逼着做了十几年题，脑子就做坏了，上了大学，说话做事，给人夹头青年的感觉。他们不知道怎么跟人交流，不知道怎么跟人沟通，遇到不同思路，看到不同经验事实，就骂别人“文科生”。这暴露了他们缺乏交流能力，也暴露了他们的头脑僵化，精神世界相当于“理工科孔乙己”。

不知道怎么跟人沟通，是中国文科、理科毕业生的共同短板。这是一种社会技能缺陷。以前，这种缺陷，虽然会影响一个人的职场表现，但在多数情况下，不至于让一个人被彻底从职场淘汰。但AI正在改变这种状况。一个人的沟通能力，不再是锦上添花的加分项，而是成为一种必备的核心技能。

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