China Enters the Data Center, AI Profits Walk Out — with Louis-Vincent Gave & Peter Boockvar

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**Dan Nathan** (1:06)
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**Louis-Vincent Gave** (1:29)
OpenAI and Tropic are essentially looking to build medieval fortresses with huge walls. They say, come into our fortress and you'll be safe here, to the Goldman Sachs of this world and the JP Morgan's, etc. And China is building Dubai. It's not a fortress, everybody can come in, everybody can come out, and you do whatever you want. And so, it's two completely, completely different concepts, which is funny because you would expect the US to be the open one. You would have because of all of the US history, and you would expect given China's history to be the closed one.
China did not have the option of doing the closed one because the closed one needs ever more compute and it needs ever bigger capital spending. Now, historically, most Chinese companies are happy to throw money and human resources at things.
This time, the US told them, you can't do it because we're not going to sell you the chips. So they had to find workarounds. The only workaround was to open source it and have lots of software developers based everywhere around the world, help you improve the product, which is completely anathema to the usual Chinese way of doing. Usually, China will just throw money at a problem. This time, they couldn't do it.

**Dan Nathan** (2:39)
Welcome to the Risk Reversal Podcast. I'm Dan Nathan. I'm joined by my very good friend, Peter Boockvar from One Point BFG Wealth Partners.

**Peter Boockvar** (2:47)
Peter's had to work.

**Louis-Vincent Gave** (2:48)
Well done.

**Dan Nathan** (2:49)
I've had to work hard. This is a lot easier, by the way. This is one of my favorite pods. I think a lot of our listeners know that. This is Louis Gov. He is the CEO of GovKel. He is in town and he's making time for us. We really, really appreciate it. Louis, welcome back to the podcast.

**Louis-Vincent Gave** (3:03)
Thanks for having me, guys.

**Dan Nathan** (3:04)
Really quickly, and we're going to get into a lot of stuff. We're going to talk geopolitics. We know that you've had an amazing, amazing call on other parts of the world. There are other parts of the world to invest outside the US. Energy has been a big theme with you, and we're going to talk about geopolitics. We definitely, I've been reading your stuff, and it's excellent. You've been talking a lot about the data center build, not just here, but abroad, and what potentially some of the reverberations will be if we do see a pullback in data center capbacks. And I know, Peter, you want to go deep in China. We've done that with you over the last year or so, and it's been great stuff. But just remind our listener a little bit about your background and your firm.

**Louis-Vincent Gave** (3:40)
Sure. My background, I'm French. I grew up in France and Paris. I went to the US for college. After college, I went back to France. I was in the French Army. I went to officer school. I was an officer for a while. Then I started work for French Investment Bank, and they sent me out to Asia. And I've been in Hong Kong basically since 1997 On and off. I've lived a couple other places, but started my company Gavekal 25 years ago.
We're headquartered in Hong Kong. We started off as a research firm. We moved into money management. So I have a private wealth arm. And our main office is Hong Kong. We have an office in Beijing and office in Paris.