CHARLATAN
The Exposé of Politics & Style
Xi Jinping received his American counterpart in Beijing on Wednesday for a multi-day state visit with all the trimmings — a welcome ceremony in the Temple of Heaven, a banquet in the Great Hall of the People, and an A-List members only glitterati of American business leaders vying for advantage despite the rivalry of the two largest, interdependent economies in the world.
Nvidia is the world's most valuable company in 2026 and leads the AI computing revolution. Apple is the world's most valuable brand, its iPhones powered by Apple-designed chips fabricated exclusively by TSMC. BlackRock's $11.6 trillion in assets under management means that Larry Fink, Jensen Huang, and Tim Cook all have preferred seating. Add the world's richest man Elon Musk, Kelly Ortberg of Boeing, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, Jane Fraser of Citigroup, and executives from Cargill, Mastercard, Visa, Qualcomm, Micron, and GE Aerospace — some of whom Trump invited personally — all of whom arrived in Beijing determined to carve up the world between them.
And if the objective of the China summit was to "manage intense bilateral rivalry and establish a fragile strategic stability" as the World Economic Forum suggest, the world's most important dinner party was missing one very particular guest. The elephant in the room is characterized by twenty-three million people; ninety miles of ocean; the most consequential supply chain on earth; and Lai Ching-te, president of the Republic of China—the most powerful man in Taiwan.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning reports that Xi told Trump: “The Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations. If it is handled properly, the bilateral relationship will enjoy overall stability. Otherwise, the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts, putting the entire relationship in great jeopardy.”
Since 2022, Washington has blocked Nvidia from selling its most Advanced Semiconductor Technology to China. Not because the chips are weapons, but because the chips build the capacity to make absolutely everything else obsolete. Trump invited Huang to the summit at the last minute and even gave him a ride on Air Force One.
And even though Nvidia was permitted to sell a lesser modified H20 chip to China in August, China’s Huawei was already producing the Ascend 910C and 910B, competitive alternatives to Nvidia's H20 and H200. If Advanced Semiconductor technology is the tool kit, Nvidia's "superchip era" — specifically the Vera Rubin platform set for 2026 — is its masterpiece. A highly integrated, heterogeneous, and ultra-powerful processor designed specifically to handle the immense demands of generative AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and AI agentic systems, the Vera Rubin isn't super-intelligence. It is hardware explicitly designed as the infrastructure to power the development of super-intelligence.
Think of superchips like the batteries that will bring a Frankenstein-like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to life. The country seat that leads or controls super-intelligence won’t just win the battle. They or 'it' will win the war over all mankind.
Armies. Surveillance states. Autonomous weapons systems won’t need a soldier to pull a trigger; a general to command an army; or even a president or an emperor to start or stop a war. AI compliments Chinese censorship and authoritarian control in the same way that it serves American democratic freedom. However, AGI — a machine that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks — is only the precursor to a fully autonomous Artificial Super-intelligence that by rights will bring the traditions of either's lives into the dystopian future.
Gathering in the Great Hall of the People, the players, politicians, and powerbrokers all assembled at a state dinner on Thursday, but the legacy suspect pack or stagecraft is seldom what it seems.
Stagecraft is seldom what it seems.
Clue #1: The world's 195+ countries carry a combined sovereign, corporate, and household debt of $353 trillion, and decoupling their shared trade and financial ties is considered virtually impossible.
Clue #2: The IMF warns that a fraught new equilibrium between U.S.-China relations, and a prolonged conflict in the Middle East, is pushing the global economy via energy shocks, sticky inflation, and a vulnerable consumers to the brink of a global recession.
Clue #3: There are 9 countries that possess nuclear weapons with a combined 12,331 nuclear warheads; Advanced semiconductors will fundamentally control, enable, and revolutionize the global financial sectors and modern armies by driving Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous systems; and Anthropic's Dario Amodei expects machines to exceed humans in every cognitive domain and AGI to emerge sometime between 2026-2027.
Finally, no country has existed since the very dawn of civilization — except China. Let's meet the suspects:
Jensen Huang — Professor Plum. The most brilliant man in the room. Taiwanese American. Born in Tainan. Built the world's most valuable company on the proposition that artificial intelligence would reshape civilization — and that the chips to run it would come from an island ninety miles off the Chinese coast. Professor Plum flew to Alaska to board the plane. He brought the weapon with him. He’s in the Ballroom. With the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip.
Larry Fink — Colonel Mustard. Old money. Serious money. $11.6 trillion dollars of your money, managed with the authority of a man who has never once doubted his own judgment. Colonel Mustard has been in China before. He will be in China again. He arrived in Beijing with a long view and a longer balance sheet. He's in the Billiards Room. With U.S. and Chinese 401ks on the table.
Tim Cook — Mrs. Peacock. (Do not pretend you don’t know what we’re saying here). Elegant. Careful. Never says more than necessary. Apple's entire product line runs on chips fabricated in Taiwan by a company that Beijing considers a domestic issue. Mrs. Peacock smiled for the photographs. She always does. She’s in the Conservatory. With the supply chain.
Elon Musk — Mr. Green. The wild card. The world's richest man has Tesla factories in Shanghai, satellites over China, and a social media platform that Beijing watches very carefully. Mr. Green's motives are never quite what they appear. He’s a hostile witness (Musk v OpenAI). He’s in the Kitchen. With a cleaver, influence and leverage.
David Solomon and Jane Fraser — Miss Scarlett and Dr. Orchid. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Wall Street's two most powerful bankers, seated at a table where the conversation is about soybeans, beef, and aircraft but the subtext is access — to capital markets, to IPOs, to the financial architecture of the world's second largest economy. Miss Scarlett and Dr. Orchid know exactly what they came for. They’re in the Dining Room. With an appetite.
Donald Trump — Mrs. White. The one who makes things disappear. She spent four years restricting chip sales to China, then made those restrictions disappear with a single phone call; she spent the last ten years promising to bring manufacturing back to the USA, then posted tariff missives on Truth Social and squelched it. She’s a moralizer. Others are often “a disgrace.” She’s in the Library but can’t read the room.
Vladimir Putin — Prince Azure. The aristocrat who arrives after the body is found and acts surprised. He declined to attend the summit in Beijing. Hungary, his last reliable friend inside NATO, voted Orbán out and Magyar in with a landslide majority win, and Europe slammed the door behind him. And so it is that Prince Azure was rejected by the west, turned toward the east, and summonsed President Xi Jinping to the Kremlin. Xi will come to Putin next week in Moscow and will continue on into every room where the west thought it had won.
For Xi Jinping — The Host is the person who assembled the guests, created the menu, set the agenda, poured the wine, and is always above suspicion—which is exactly how the most dangerous people in any room operate. The philosopher-king smiles for every photograph, presses every palm, and toasts every guest but the one at the very epicenter of the world's most significant geo-political realm—a 13,976-square mile island called the Republic of China.
The host knows the “picks and shovels” are in Santa Clara, California. The host knows the victim is the Silicon Shield. And the host knows and is wise to the fact that the body, if yet to awake, will be printed in Taiwan.
All the World’s a Stage
Make sense of the week's news.
Charlatan reviews the worldview.
CHARLATAN
The Exposé of Politics & Style
