The Way to Beat the East Is to Be Faster Than Them ;)
Around 2012, NVIDIA’s investment team reached out to me to discuss taking on a leadership role in their investor relations department. At the time, I was tallying millions of reads across financial publications. I wrote frequently about NVIDIA’s positioning, architecture cycles, and competitive moat — and whenever I did, their IR team would reach out with thoughts, corrections, or “context.” That was the nature of financial narrative shaping back then: you didn’t just analyze; you co-wrote the story with the companies themselves.
So when I hear Jensen Huang speak now, I listen differently.
I know the cadence. I know how corporate conviction is massaged into market euphoria. And I know how a CEO can be simultaneously prophetic and self-serving.
What troubles me isn’t the innovation — NVIDIA has earned its throne. It’s the theatrics of competition. Because in truth, the “AI arms race” only exists if you convince the world the other side is close.
But if China’s open-source LLMs were genuinely breathing down NVIDIA’s neck, why would NVIDIA lobby Washington to remove limits on chip access?
Why would they amplify the supposed “threat” of Chinese AI projects that, in commercial reality, barely function beyond research demos?
I signed up for several of those Chinese “AI agent” offerings. Most were inaccessible, half-built, or entirely unresponsive. They exist in press releases, not in practice. That’s not competition — that’s narrative inflation.
Elon said it best this week: in technology, the company that innovates the fastest wins.
Speed isn’t just a business metric; it’s a weapon. And the irony is that speed — true iteration velocity — is precisely where the West continues to dominate. If you download any of the “open” Chinese LLMs, you’ll see: the gap isn’t closing; it’s widening.
NVIDIA, of course, benefits from this illusion. The more imminent the “AI arms race” feels, the more GPUs everyone buys. The more existential the rhetoric, the stronger the margins.
Even Elon’s own rhetoric about “buying every GPU on the planet” reinforces the same feedback loop — one that keeps big tech as the gatekeeper of computational sovereignty.