The AI Cold War, Signalgate, CoreWeave IPO, Tariff Endgames, El Salvador Deportations

Baker said Nvidia’s investments in CoreWeave and other neo-clouds were meant to weaken hyperscaler buyer power, not manufacture revenue. He argued Nvidia could have sold the same GPUs to Meta, Tesla, Amazon or Microsoft, while reference-architecture customers got capacity online faster and diversified demand.

Nvidia’s receivables surge is a warning worth watching, but Baker tied it to the unusually difficult Hopper-to-Blackwell transition. Blackwell racks weigh about 3,000 pounds, draw 120kW and require liquid cooling versus Hopper’s 1,000 pounds and 60kW; he said continued receivables growth past July would concern him.

CoreWeave’s risk is obvious—nearly $8 billion of debt and more than 60% of revenue from Microsoft—but Baker thinks its operational skill is the overlooked moat. Synchronizing tens of thousands of GPUs reliably is difficult, and he argued only a small number of operators can run such training clusters well.

Baker said U.S. chip export controls may buy time while strengthening China’s incentives to build substitutes and improve algorithms. He considered a China-made Nvidia peer within five years essentially impossible, but would not make the same claim over ten years; he cited DeepSeek as evidence restrictions can spur efficiency innovation.

Chamath gave a rare firsthand example of why IP location can matter as much as factory location: Facebook shifted critical IP to Ireland while he was an executive signatory. He said that decision helped produce a 10–15-year IRS dispute and argued U.S. policy should make retaining valuable IP domestically easier.

Friedberg said he had heard the administration ultimately wanted to eliminate taxes for people earning under $150,000, alongside tariffs, spending cuts and deregulation. Chamath contrasted that ambition with a roughly $1.9 trillion deficit and Wall Street tariff-revenue estimates of only $170–300 billion, implying much deeper spending reductions if those estimates held. (RealClearPolitics)

The Signal episode was more than a wrong-recipient embarrassment: the panel identified both national-security exposure and federal-records risk. Jeffrey Goldberg had entered a senior-official Houthi-strike chat; Friedberg cited record-preservation precedent, while Baker noted the chat showed officials understood the Red Sea operation benefited Europe far more than America. (The Atlantic)

The administration sent 238 alleged gang members to El Salvador’s CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act, while the episode highlighted several possible misidentifications tied partly to tattoos. Friedberg opposed imprisonment without prior due process; Chamath argued errors could be corrected afterward, making the core dispute whether deterrence can justify innocent people being swept up. (investing.com)