Vivek

This year, Beijing told Chinese companies to avoid buying Nvidia's H200 chip and use a Huawei chip instead. But US intelligence believes that China's main spy agency was secretly working the other side. As the Financial Times reported on Saturday, the Ministry of State Security had recruited a Chinese businesswoman called Alice Huang. A US memo says she'd had a romantic relationship with Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang. Nvidia won't comment. The memo was passed to top US officials this spring, just before President Trump flew to Beijing. Jensen Huang was not on the plane. Instead, the president called him up, and Jensen flew to Alaska to board Air Force One on a stopover. You don't send your top spy agency after something you don't want. And Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei, said last year that the US has exaggerated Huawei's achievements: that Huawei "isn't that capable yet." Alibaba agrees. In March, the technical head of its AI cloud business said that the impact of not being able to use Nvidia chips is "big, very big." This matters because Jensen Huang has spent years telling Washington that China doesn't really need American chips. If they can't get Nvidia products, he says, Chinese companies will switch to home-grown chips, so the US may as well keep selling them. This year, he personally lobbied President Trump to allow sales of the H200. @DarioAmodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, is no skeptic when it comes to the idea that China will eventually make its own chips. His argument is that this is a moot point: the question is who will develop powerful AI first, because even a slight lead time can compound into a lasting lead. In April, with the help of Anthropic's most recent model, a team at Mozilla fixed 423 security bugs in its Firefox web browser in a single month, around 20 times as fast as it can usually manage. An old hand at Chinese cybersecurity summed up the mood in a WeChat post, saying that it felt as though China was still sharpening its swords when the other side had suddenly unveiled a fully automatic Gatling gun. Beijing's spy agency seems to understand the stakes. Alice Huang almost certainly isn't why Jensen wants to keep selling chips to China. He began warning about export controls back in 2023, and China generated around a fifth of Nvidia's revenue in 2024. He has a fiduciary duty to his shareholders to sell more chips. But the optics look bad, and call into question his judgment. This week, the House committees on China, foreign affairs and intelligence asked to meet him in a closed-door briefing. Senator Chris Coons, who will become the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, has promised an investigation. So the loudest voice in Washington pushing to sell chips to China in the exact years that Dario says are the ones that count is being called to answer questions in Congress.

The UN predicts that India's fertility rate will fall to about 1.7 children per woman and then stay there until the end of the century. The UN made a similar prediction for Thailand, but its birth rate has since fallen to less than one child per woman. In the UN's 2024 projections, the fertility rate in Thailand stood at around 1.2 children per woman, and was predicted to rise gradually thereafter. But Thailand's own population institute, at Mahidol University, now estimates that the figure for this year is 0.86. Last year, there were around 417,000 births and about 560,000 deaths in the country. Thailand is not a rich country. Its per capita income is around $7,400 a year, about a fifth of South Korea's. Colombia, which has a similar per capita income, has had a similar trajectory: the fertility rate was 1.1 children per woman in 2024, a record low, according to the national statistics agency. The UN's estimate for Colombia in 2024 was 1.6. The UN's demographic model assumes that fertility rates, once they decline to low levels, will eventually stabilize and then begin to rise again. But Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal), an economist on the Indian prime minister's advisory council, pointed out last year that no country whose birth rate has fallen below the replacement rate has ever seen it rise back to it. India's official fertility rate stands at 1.9, and the UN expects it to fall gradually to 1.76 by 2050. But the Indian states that started declining earliest are already far below that level. According to the government's own sample survey, Delhi's fertility rate is 1.2, and Tamil Nadu's, Kerala's and West Bengal's have all fallen to 1.3, about where Thailand was in 2020. According to the national health survey, two regions have already reached or fallen below one: the Himalayan state of Sikkim has a fertility rate of 1.0, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have a rate of 0.9. According to another projection, published in The Lancet, India's overall rate will fall to 1.29 by 2050. The chief minister of Andhra Pradesh has cited a projection that his state's fertility rate will fall to around 1.07, and his government is offering families around $320 for a third child in the meantime. India's official projection assumes that the fall in the fertility rate will stall at 1.7. The middle-income countries that declined before India did not stop there, and neither have the Indian states and territories that led the way within India.