H200s in China, Apple Blocks Vibe Coding, Peptide Debates | Andy Fang, Matt Jayson, Dr. Cameron Sepah, Chris Gadek, Chris Hladczuk, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Matt Huang

**John Coogan** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN. Today is Wednesday, March 18th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN El Tridome, the Temple of Technology.

**Jordi Hays** (0:09)
The Forge of Finance.

**John Coogan** (0:10)
Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Let's also pull up the linear line up. Of course, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces are linear using agents. We have a great show lined up. We have Matt Wang from Paradigm joining at the end of the show. Cameron from Maximus is coming in person. We got Andy Fang from DoorDash, Matt.

**Jordi Hays** (0:34)
New acquisition.

**John Coogan** (0:36)
We got a great lightning round.

**Jordi Hays** (0:37)
Chris from AdQuick.

**John Coogan** (0:38)
Two Chris's. We're going back to back Chris's today. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching TBPN. As always, the big news of the day, more news out of NVIDIA GTC, lots of NVIDIA announcements. The stock is up. It's a $4.44 trillion company. The last time I checked, that is big. NVIDIA has been on an absolute tear. And some really promising things with the Grok acquisition already, or like pseudo acquisition, the deal, the Grok partnership. They're already starting to explain a little bit more about how those two technologies fit together. And there's some good coverage and strategy about that. But the big news out of NVIDIA yesterday was that NVIDIA says it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China specifically. So Jensen Wong says the company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market. We've been tracking this for a long time. Of course, chips were banned from sale for sale to China in 2022 by Joe Biden under the Chips Act that also unlocked billions of dollars in incentives for American chip manufacturing. We began following the Intel story. We began following the Huawei story. There were a number of different initiatives. And then the narrative flipped back and forth, back and forth on what are the risks and what are the costs and benefits of actually selling chips to China.
Back in 2022, after the Chips Act, which if you want to read up more on it, we've interviewed Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It's a great book. I highly recommend it.

**Jordi Hays** (2:19)
We should have him back on.

**John Coogan** (2:21)
That'd be amazing.

**Jordi Hays** (2:21)
About that time.

**John Coogan** (2:22)
Yeah. Ben Thompson's also covered the story throughout. There's a whole bunch of good stuff in strutekery on chips in China. And the calculus has always been pretty clear. Like on the first pass, the first order of facts, AI is an important technology. America wants an advantage in the AI race, the AI buildout. So less chips for China means more chips for America, stronger US economic engine.

**Jordi Hays** (2:46)
Massive chip shortage right now. You see old chips being valued basically more than they were when they launched, which implies there's plenty of demand in America. So you'd want to keep those here.

**John Coogan** (2:58)
And plenty of demand at TSMC from American chip makers specifically.
I mean, even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the two nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs, but they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. But the second order effects are what are more complicated. So in November of 2022, I was writing about this, and I said on a YouTube video, in the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip. Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC's manufacturing facilities online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it. So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean, even the tiniest earthquake.

**Jordi Hays** (3:54)
Right, they have to track the weather. Yes, outside of the facility.

**John Coogan** (3:58)
Exactly.

**Jordi Hays** (3:58)
If the weather outside of the facilities is fluctuating at all.

**John Coogan** (4:00)
It can affect yield inside. Earthquakes. Taiwan is famous or TSMC is famous where they don't even need apparently a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake, they just get up and go to the factory and start working on things. It's not like they need to like, oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know because that's the level of sensitivity over the TSMC fab.