Morozov: "The microchip is the new oil, it decides supremacy"

NEW YORK – It was the board of directors that pushed Jensen Huang to resign. And the sequence is telling: on Sunday, with the espionage accusation splashed across every newspaper, they reaffirmed their confidence in him. After the New York Times revelations about his relationship with a second woman, an employee, they changed their minds. The suspicion of espionage was acceptable, the violation of internal rules was not." Evgeny Morozov is the sociologist and expert on new media who studies technology's impact on society. Was he really so naive as to fall into the sexual trap of a Chinese spy? "Sex is the least interesting aspect of this story. Huang wanted to sell his microchips to China. And the same goes for the US government. Commerce Secretary Lutnick said it publicly a year ago: 'We need to sell to the Chinese and make sure their developers depend on American technology.' In January, Washington granted the licenses, pocketing 25 percent. The naive ones, if anything, are the governments, too prone to confusing a salesman's patter with geopolitical strategy." Why did it become a matter of national security? "In this context, 'national security' means keeping Chinese companies a generation behind by rationing their computing power. It's an economic war in disguise: and the blockade rewards whoever breaks it. Where the sale is legal, a batch of Nvidia's best chips costs 600,000 dollars: in China, in October, one was sold for 2.8 million dollars." In the past, scandals like this brought down presidents. Does a CEO like Huang have the same kind of influence? "It was presidents who treated him as an equal. Macron talking to him about 'fighting for sovereignty'; Trump taking him along to Beijing. Washington has turned chips into what the dollar was in the 2010s and oil was in the 1970s — instruments for rewarding allies and starving enemies. But it left them in private hands. It is no surprise that Commerce Department officials had demanded that any investigation into Nvidia be pre-approved by them." And what will happen to Nvidia now? "On the market, not much, at least not in the short term. But it has certainly lost its political authority. Until now, it decided who its customers would be and only informed Washington afterward. Now Congress will decide. Among other things, the pending rules call for the insertion of locators in the chips: which is precisely the accusation Washington has leveled at Huawei for the past 10 years. Every government that has bought 'sovereign AI' from Huang must read those bills. What they have purchased could be tracked and, in the end, switched off." Is Huang replaceable? "As a manager, yes: the company produces software its customers cannot abandon. As a diplomat, no. He personally negotiated with Trump and with Xi, with the Gulf emirs and with the leaders of half of Europe: a role not provided for in the corporate org chart." What is the political impact? "The scandal hands the issue over to the hawks of both parties, and Trump, after the midterm result, cannot stop them." How much will it weigh on the Trump-Xi meeting next week? "It will take place; they both want a truce. And besides, this is not so much about China versus America as it is about private companies from both countries against the governments of the states involved."