The alpha, twice a week
That was 2 min.
Get the best new moments in your inbox every Wednesday and Saturday. It's free.
Check your inbox
We sent a link to your address. Click it to finish signing up. Not there in a minute? Look in spam.
or
The Joe Rogan Experience · 2 min · Apr 25, 2025
Company-based chip controls can be bypassed through nearby facilities
Jeremie Harris
The guests describe a bridge between facilities that lets wafers pass through equipment a Chinese firm could not directly access.
In this episode
Full episode- 1:38:00AI systems may resist attempts to change their goals3 min
- 1:48:20AI scaling runs into chip and power constraints8 min
- 0:25AI research task horizons are doubling every four months3 min
- 48:41A perfect perimeter cannot replace testing security capabilities7 min
- 1:15:32Company-based chip controls can be bypassed through nearby facilities2 min
- 1:18:58Executives describe export controls differently to Washington and investors2 min
- 1:56:36DeepSeek's compute complaints cut against Beijing's message4 min
“the chinese literally built a bridge between the two facilities so they can just like shimmy the wafers over”
Jeremie Harrisat 1:16:21 · The Joe Rogan Experience
Takeaways
- Controls applied by company can be bypassed across nearby facilities.
- Wafers can be moved to use equipment at an eligible site.
- Subsidiaries and third-country intermediaries add more gaps.
About this segment
The guests describe a bridge between facilities that lets wafers pass through equipment a Chinese firm could not directly access. The example shows how company-specific export controls can be bypassed.
CEO, Gladstone AI
Created a leading course on AI in national security and briefed senior government officials on AI risk.
Joe Rogan, Host · Host, The Joe Rogan Experience
From “Joe Rogan Experience #2311 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris”, Apr 25, 2025. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 1:15:36
So we have – the way we set up export controls still today on most equipment that these semiconductor fabs use, like the Chinese semiconductor fabs use, we're still sending them a whole bunch of shit. The way we set export controls is instead of like, oh, we're sending this gear to China and like now it's in China and we can't do anything about it. Instead, we still have this thing where we're like, no, no, no.
- 1:16:00
this company in china is cool that company in china is not cool so we can ship to this company but we can't ship to that company and so you get this ridiculous shit like for example there's there's like an a couple of facilities that you could see by satellite one of the facilities is okay to ship equipment to the other facility right next door is like considered you know military connected or whatever and so we can't ship the chinese literally built a bridge between the two facilities so they can just like shimmy the wafers over to like oh yeah we use equipment and then shimmy it back and now okay we're done so it's like and you can see it by satellite so they're not even like trying to hide it like our our stuff is just like so badly put together china's prioritizing this so highly that like the idea that we're gonna um so we do it by company
- 1:16:47
through this basically it's like an export blacklist like you can't send to huawei you can't send to any number of other companies that are considered affiliated with the chinese military or where we're concerned about military applications. Reality is in China, civil-military fusion is their policy. In other words, every private company, like, yeah, that's cute, dude. You're working for yourself.
- 1:17:07
Yeah, no, no, no, buddy. You're working for the Chinese state. We come in. We want your shit. We get your shit. There's no true kind of distinction between the two. And so when you have this attitude where you're like, yeah, we're going to have some companies where we're like, you can't send to them, but that creates a situation where literally huawei will spin up like a dozen subsidiaries or new companies with new names that aren't on our our blacklist and so like for for months or years you're able to just ship chips to them nowhere and that's to say nothing of like using intermediaries in like singapore or other countries oh yeah you wouldn't you wouldn't believe the number of ai chips that are shipping to malaysia can't wait for the latest like huge language model to come out of malaysia and actually it's