Paul Triolo (@pstAsiatech) header
Paul Triolo (@pstAsiatech) profile picture

Unflinching look @ nexus: tech/geopolitics. Digital Econ, Semis, AI, Greentech, Partner, China/Tech Policy Lead DGA ASG, ASPI CCA. Substack: AI Decrypted

Washington, DC
Joined May 2016
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MOFCOM has released a draft “Special Provisions on Protecting Chinese Trade Secrets”: 10 articles, comments due Nov 24...caps month of mirror-image legal tooling between Washington summit and Shenzhen meetings. What is going on? A short thread.🧵 tfs.mofcom.gov.cn/lfzqyj/art…
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HP and Asus shift some PC making back to China due to AI-driven cost hikes China remains the best option for making computers, with its experienced workforce, lower prices and a complete supply chain ecosystem that can offer full access to components. Also seeing companies sourcing more rare earths and components in China..... asia.nikkei.com/business/tec… via @NikkeiAsia
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Avoid studying in China? FBI battles US student fears over security clearances Simon: US wants “more Americans who understand China”, yet the “increasingly securitised atmosphere” could discourage “precisely the kinds of educational and professional experiences necessary to develop that expertise”. @pstAsiatech: we are not living in the 1960s here...and real, as opposed to remote China expertise is even more important... sc.mp/8ga42
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Let's take a look..... The chart counts where GPUs/accelerators physically land according to customs records. That makes it useful, but it leaves out several really important things that matter for a real analysis of US-China compute gap. A short thread. 🧵
Why does Malaysia have so much compute? 🤔
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Remote access. Chinese firms renting cloud GPUs abroad don’t appear in China’s share at all. This is the main gap in any “share by country” picture relevant to export controls. The Gulf, and everyone else grouped as “Other.” UAE and Saudi Arabia (G42, Humain, Stargate UAE) are a policy story in their own right but are hidden here, along with the UK, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
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Clearly part of Malaysia’s bar is functionally Chinese-used compute, even though it legally sits outside China. Some of it may also be a mislabeled transit point: in early 2025, three people were charged in Singapore for reselling Nvidia GPUs through Malaysia to China. That fits with Malaysia’s slice flattening in 2026. Kuala Lumpur began requiring permits for all exports, trans-shipments and transits of US-made high-performance chips in July 2025, and paused Tier 1 and 2 data center approvals in November 2025. However, the rules still leave room for Chinese data centres to import US chips for use inside Malaysia. That is exactly the remote-access gap that this chart, and the current US control framework, both struggle to capture. For more see: pstaidecrypted.substack.com/… Let's just say, in one year, this chart will look dramatically different, you heard it here first....End thread.
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Whoa.....
Now SK and Micron saying the same.
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Yup..... @AGraylin .... the upside here is massive. And this won't be people running small models on their laptops...
This is correct. The vast majority of enterprise workflows have not actually had agents applied to them in any meaningful way. The economy probably has this deployed < 1% right now. At best you have a few automated systems in a company that do a single pass of an LLM to make a decision or provide feedback, but very little real “automation”. Some of this is a statement about the adoption rates of technology in enterprises, but the vast majority of it is really just due to the capability of AI itself. That’s all changing. Now with computer use, long running agents, harness improvements and surrounding infrastructure, we’re finally at a point where we can start to apply agents at more complex workflows. We will see self-improving systems that can take any particular workflow goal and improve the execution rates over a volume of instances. And with the emerging form factor of agent swarms, you can just choose to deploy any amount of compute at a problem and agents will off and do the work. This won’t be about and users prompting agents to complete a specific task for them, but instead the organization reengineering the underlying workflows to take advantage of agents in their processes. This will have a massive impact in finance, life sciences, healthcare, and other information-heavy domains. Lots of opportunity to build and deploy these systems right now.
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This....
Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of drug development. In this blog post, we share some early results from these efforts, and describe how this work fits in with our wider ambitions in the life sciences. anthropic.com/research/early…
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"But the OECD study uses a flawed methodology to estimate interest rate subsidies, which account for about three-quarters of its estimate of Chinese industrial subsidies in 2005–24 (OECD 2026b, 8). Other studies also have substantial methodological weaknesses. Because of their flaws, these studies do not provide useful guidance for policymakers trying to judge the magnitude of Chinese industrial subsidies."
Future studies trying to judge magnitude of Chinese industrial subsidies should improve methodology, including fully disclosing the data on which they base their estimates & explaining why their estimates differ from prior studies, Nicholas Lardy says. piie.com/publications/policy…
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AI Drives Career Pivot for China’s Programmers, Report Shows More Chinese programmers are shifting into artificial intelligence, chips and robotics as traditional coding jobs contract, according to a new report, underscoring how AI is reshaping — not eliminating — the country’s software workforce. caixinglobal.com/2026-10-28/…
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This....
Replying to @ArtificialAnlys
Open weights models fall further behind in v5. The leader, Kimi K3.1 Pro (weights not yet released), scores 46, 12 points behind the leader, compared with a 3-point gap in v4.3. Of models with released weights, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (max) and GLM-5.3 (max) score highest at 32, and Claude Haiku 5.5 (max) outscores all of them. The gap is widest on HLE-Diamond and Terminal-Bench-Science, where Kimi K3.1 Pro scores 37% and 34%, compared with 68% for Claude Opus 5.5 (max) and 63% for GPT-6 Astra (max).
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China rushes to shore up markets as AI trade sours ‘National team’ of funds and brokers buy stocks after CSI 300 index enters technical bear market ft.com/content/2bb82c45-04b2… via @ft
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