Normal Science

Critical Mineral Security: The Endgame

is a non-resident fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. This essay is the final winner of our economic security essay contest!After fifteen years of bipartisan attention, countless executive orders, and tens of billions in appropriated and authorized funding, the United States remains overwhelmingly reliant on China for the critical minerals. In some cases, that reliance has increased. Over that same period, foreign interference in critical mineral supply chains has moved from a hypo...

Will the MATCH Act Change Chip Controls?

Starting in October 2022, the Biden administration’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) updated chip controls like clockwork, with a cadence of updates every year.Since Trump 2.0, however, the clock has stood still. Export controls on semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment have not been substantively updated since December 2024. The Trump administration has been reticent to update controls and has even considered walking them back. Over the past year alone, there have been t...

Offenders sentenced up to 10 years for spying on TSMC

Bringing Taiwan to the World and the World to Taiwan

Iran demands Big Tech pay fees for undersea Internet cables in Strait of Hormuz

Iran's claim over subsea chokepoint pushes US tech companies to overland fiber.

US Military personnel are being targeted using location data

Arizona's Abundance Playbook

How did Arizona lock in billion-dollar investments from TSMC, Intel, and LG Energy?Ian O’Grady, Senior Policy Advisor to Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, joins ChinaTalk to share war stories from the state that’s successfully reshoring semiconductor and battery production.Our conversation covers:Labor Disputes and Crisis Management — How the Governor’s Office mediates disagreements between stakeholders and keeps workers happy.Clean Air Act vs. chips — Why Arizona’s fabs struggled to get building pe...

A U.S. Economic Security “Latency Fund”

With pretty much no news out of this Xi-Trump trip, how about checking out another economic security contest winner? This one comes from Guy Ward-Jackson, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Tony Blair Institute. You can reach him at Guy.Ward-Jackson@institute.global or read more of his writing on his Substack. Views are his own.Economic Deterrence Without AutarkyThe Cold War sparked an entire academic and policy discipline on nuclear deterrence and statecraft. It is time that the sphere of economic ...

How to Buy Cheap Claude Tokens in China

is a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab and holds a Master’s degree in Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford.On April 23, 2026, the White House released a memo warning that Chinese entities were running “industrial-scale” distillation campaigns against American frontier AI models, leveraging “tens of thousands of proxy accounts” to evade detection. In February 2026, Anthropic similarly reported on Chinese labs’ coordinated distillation attacks using “a singl...

The Quantum Industrial Base

Constanza Vidal Bustamante, Senior Researcher at CNAS and author of the landmark report Quantum’s Industrial Moment, joins ChinaTalk to map out how supply chains behind quantum computers wind through the US and China. Co-hosting are Chris Miller, author of Chip War, and Zachary Yerushalmi.Our conversation covers:What it takes to build a quantum computer — Inside the cryogenic supply chain, the helium-3 bottleneck, and why mining the moon might actually make sense.How export controls backfired — ...

No Jensen, Not All Compute is Created Equal

is in Cape Town for two weeks… email Nick at nick@chinatalk.media if you’re interested in joining a ChinaTalk meetup!We’ve recently tried to pin down how much compute China actually has, approaching the question from both the supply and demand sides. We converged on roughly 2.5 to 2.8 million H100-equivalents. But a single aggregate figure only captures part of the picture.Jensen on ChinaOn Dwarkesh’s podcast last week, Jensen Huang argued that China already has enough compute to build frontier ...

DeepSeek V4

Finally, DeepSeek V4 is here. The Pro and Flash models are available through DeepSeek’s website, mobile apps, and API access as of April 23, and the lab has also released its technical report.Bucking a recent trend of Chinese AI labs moving away from open source, V4 was released under the highly permissive MIT license. It performs admirably on various benchmarks and leads the pack of Chinese open models, but did not close the gap with closed models from the US, with the authors themselves admitt...

WarTalk: Out of Ammo

The Iran war burned through America’s L-RASM, JASSM-ER, and Tomahawk stockpiles — weapons designed for a Pacific fight against the PLA Navy, not the Iranian corvette fleet. Now Pentagon insiders are leaking that we can’t win a war over Taiwan, and it’s a six-year pipeline to refill magazines.Joining us: Bryan Clark of the Hudson Institute and former submariner; , former Green Beret now in defense tech; Eric Robinson, former OSC/NCTC analyst and 101st Airborne officer, now a lawyer; and .We discu...

All In On Fusion

Caleb Harding is a Mandarin-speaking BYU CS graduate. He previously interned at the US Embassy in Jakarta and Doublethink Lab in Taiwan. He is currently based in D.C. Today, At its inception in July 2025, China Fusion Energy Co. (CFEC, 中国聚变能源有限公司) was the biggest nuclear fusion company in the world by registered capital.1 Major state-owned enterprises pledged a total of US$2.1 billion in funding, reflecting a serious commitment on the part of these companies — and by extension, the CCP — to maki...

Quantum 101

What exactly is quantum computing? Why does it matter, and what would it actually mean to “win” the quantum race? Zach Yerushalmi, CEO of Elevate Quantum, a Mountain West–based public-private consortium advancing the U.S. quantum ecosystem, and Chris Miller join the podcast to discuss.Our conversation covers…What Quantum Computing Actually Is — A primer on qubits, superposition, and why quantum computers aren’t “faster classical machines” but fundamentally different systems designed to simulate ...

Fixing the GaN Problem

In the semiconductor industry, the Trump administration is striving to bring back critical technologies that slipped out of our hands decades ago. The U.S. has attracted billions of dollars in investment to stimulate cutting-edge logic manufacturing, the development of EUV lithography, and HBM production. However, the semiconductor ecosystem is a lot more than just AI chips. And if the administration wants secure supply chains, it should focus on another rising material: gallium.Just as Pluto is...

Clinical Trial Abundance, Made in China

A guest post by Jacob Stern:I work with Sid Sijbrandij, a technology entrepreneur who has taken a radically personalized and high-agency approach to fighting his osteosarcoma (bone cancer). Before meeting Sid, I was a product lead at 10x Genomics, a sequencing technology company developing novel tools for understanding biology. Sid was the first person I met who had used 10x tools to inform their care. I now run the enterprise of Sid’s care, pursuing a strategy of maximal diagnostics, making per...

Should the US Buy from CXMT?

The “RAMageddon” is here. Tears roll down gamers’ cheeks as AI ruins DDR5 prices. People are even giving RAM as wedding presents. Why is memory going to the moon, and what are the geopolitical implications?Source: PCPartPickerThe Big Three memory makers — SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron — have dedicated increasing capacity to memory for AI, or HBM. High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is a product that stacks multiple DRAM dies for AI memory. The increased allocation toward high-margin HBM means that not e...

How Ukraine Scaled to Millions of Drones

Ukrainian drone manufacturing. How has the country been able to scale from thousands to millions of drones over the past four years? What dependencies does its industrial base still have on China? And what lessons does its rapid scaling offer for the US?To discuss, we’re joined by Cat Buchatskiy, Director of Analytics at Snake Island, a military analytical group, along with Chris MillerOur conversation covers:How battlefield pressure forced Ukraine to build a drone war machine from scratch — fro...

Data Hacks and the US-China AI Race

is a JD candidate at Yale Law School. Previously, he was Chief of Staff at SparkAI, a machine learning operations and autonomy startup that was acquired by a Fortune 100 company.Mercor isn’t top of mind in DC today, but the expert-data ecosystem it represents is a core determinant of AI capabilities growth and the U.S. frontier AI advantage. Last week’s hack and data breach at Mercor, and the broader security challenge it represents, may shape the future of tech competition. It also could hold t...

Between Two Nerds: How AI will upset state cyber competition

In this edition of Between Two Nerds Tom Uren and The Grugq discuss how the rise of AI, which is very good at vulnerability and exploit development, will change the cyber security industry and competition between states. This episode is also available on YouTube Show notes The Grugq on X: People are freaking out about an impending flood of 0days Patrick Gray with former NSA and CIA cyber leaders