Sinocism | Bill Bishop | Substack (@sinocism.com.web.brid.gy)

Xi-Trump meeting; US to sell Nvidia B30A chips to China?; Birth of the 15th Five-Year Plan recommendations Xi and Trump will meet at 11 a.m. local time on Thursday. The PRC side confirmed the meeting Wednesday, saying the two will meet to “exchange views on bilateral relations and issues of mutual interest 就中美关系和双方共同关心的问题交换意见”. The PRC side has started to purchase soybeans again and Trump told reporters that Nvidia’s modified Blackwell chip, the B30A, will be on the agenda. This paper from the Institute for Progress (IFP) is an excellent primer on why approving sales of those chips is a bad idea. The chip, according to the IFP, is more than twelve times more powerful than the H20 and it blows past the U.S. export thresholds by roughly eighteenfold. On price–performance it sits at parity with America’s top-end chips, delivering about half their throughput at roughly half the cost. Huawei does not expect to field a domestic chip in this class until the fourth quarter of 2028, best-case.If Trump does tell Xi he approves the B30A, and the Chinese start placing orders, then we will know that the ban on purchasing H20s was more of a ploy to hold out for the much better B30A than a sign that Xi is confident enough with indigenous chip development that he believes the PRC no longer needs large quantities of the much better Nvidia chips. https://sinocism.com/p/xi-trump-meeting-us-to-sell-nvidia