Anyone who’s been around Wall Street could have told you Lutnick has had questionable morals and ethics even against subpar standards among finance professionals.
Lutnick is a TRAITOR, he manipulated the system to benefit his company, at the expense of the National Security of the US, by investing in this Malaysian data center which in effect, allowed the Chinese military a source to run their code on Blackwells, and if he's not arrested for treason and a stop put to it, all the next generations of advanced Nvidia GPUs.
Yup. He also took the $7B+ which was meant for Natcast and put it through the NIST CRDO solicitation, as a way to get information and equity from leap-ahead semico technology startups and companies. He is one of the most corrupt individuals in this government, which is abysmally low in this regard in the first place.
I am neither a US nor a Chinese citizen, so I have no stake in either side. But are you truly certain that blocking China’s access to the most advanced gpus is a sound long-term strategy? "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." (Puzo/Coppola)
Keeping Chinese AI firms dependent on CUDA is good for NVDA, but not for USA. If these were toys for video games then this would be true. But these are strategic assets powering the most consequential technology development of all time. The second these machines started to have national security implications, the strategy changed. The CCP has a long history of aggressively blocking Western entrants to their market. This is maybe a bit heavy handed for taxis and search engines, but it is totally justified and highly advisable for defense tech. It would be foolish for the CCP to not develop their own domestic production for defense technology. Similarly the US would be foolish to not restrict their access to such technologies. Criticizing either side for acting in their obvious interests is a bit unfair, so hence we have the current stand off.
I think that in this case it's about the "rules for thee, but not for me" aspect. If the average U.S. citizen attempted to do what Lutnick allegedly did, the consequences would likely be unpleasant, at best.
And the average US citizen re-elected the poster child president for "rules for thee, but not for me." And IMO if he hadn't started the Iran War, imposed tariffs, and driven inflation through the roof, his approval rating would still be 47%+ like at the beginning of his second term.
> are you truly certain that blocking China’s access to the most advanced gpus is a sound long-term strategy?
There is a reasonable debate to be had around the level of limits. But I think it’s clear there need to be some. The idea that China won’t develop a local supplier if we sell to them is a ship that sailed a decade ago. And we’re still unclear on the AI’s future development curve—if it looks like what some proponents believe, it would make sense to preserve every advantage we have.
Cantor & Fitzgerald is deep state associated and handles Tether's collateral after taking over from the CIA Deltec bank.
This could be approved operations to get Chinese companies to run their models in controlled data centers. The only hole in this theory is that the NYT would not print this if it were the case.
The disgust for the personality in other comments here is justified. But the broader picture is that Wexner, Lutnick and Epstein have always been deep state adjacent. In the early days Bears Stearns handle slush funds and laundering, then Cantor & Fitzgerald, now Bitcoing/Tether.
If you just focus on the personality there'll be another Lutnick soon.
The American people voted for a clown and got the circus.
Unwinding it all takes. at best, another 2 years.
I get it, these people are pretty terrible, but some reflection and soul-searching is needed. Why is such a large group so gullible/dumb/desperate and how has society/traditional republicans/democrats failed them? How did it come to this?
I would like to note, the clown is a convicted felon, and a convicted sex offender. Something known at the time of the second elections, by the millions who voted for him.
Lutnick most certainly wasn't acting alone. The truth of the matter is that The neo-liberal project that hollowed out American business/manufacturing, the supported ruinous offshoring is composed of traitors to the American people on both sides of the aisle. They should all be prosecuted as such.
Just as long as we don't give a pass to those who might loudly complain about this, while just flagrantly looting in different ways (eg Grump himself). At this point I think most people recognize the original decades-old problem even if we disagree on specifics. The real difficulty is that the political banner of opposition to neoliberalism has also been captured by that same class of shot-term anti-patriotic looter, merely running a different/newer con job.
Like in 2026, we don't really need to worry about domestic industries and production lines getting shipping to China. That has basically run its course, and while it would be great to work on rebuilding our industries, nobody really has a plan for doing that beyond hopium. The active attack we do need to worry about is further destruction of what still remains of the decentralized US economy, in favor of rolling up ever more activity into megacorps (through high prices on energy and raw goods, open political favoritism, continued regulatory capture, etc).
> The real difficulty is that the political banner of opposition to neoliberalism has also been captured by that same class of shot-term anti-patriotic looter, merely running a different/newer con job.
Agreed. They need to go as well.
> What we do need to worry about is further destruction of what still remains of the decentralized US economy, in favor of rolling up ever more activity into megacorps (through high prices on energy and raw goods, open political favoritism, continued regulatory capture, etc).
Sure, but we also need to do our own infrastructure buildup, offshoring hasn't run it's course, we still have places all over the country with no real economic prospects. There has to be something for that alongside bringing the megacorps to heel.
not saying it’s necessarily a good thing but offshoring and financialization enabled American companies like Apple to retain a much larger chunk of profits and return more wealth to shareholders, who in turn recycled that money back into American assets, lowered cost of capital, raised valuations, funded startups that raised tech salaries and pulled global talent at the expense of other countries
In an alternate universe, keeping manufacturing industries and jobs onshore would likely have come at the expense of American dominance and high salaries in tech, and higher cost consumer goods - probably not a huge deal to most people
> but offshoring and financialization enabled American companies like Apple to retain a much larger chunk of profits and return more wealth to shareholders, who in turn recycled that money back into American assets, lowered cost of capital, raised valuations, funded startups that raised tech salaries and pulled global talent at the expense of other countries
So trickle down, but it only helps a small number of people in a handful of coastal cities? And imports people into the US to then take work from citizens?
And even that is no longer really happening (except for the importing people to take work from citizens), and hasn't for a few years now (not sure if you've seen the tech job market at the moment). Yes, there was a brief period of time that a few technologists were making 6 figures starting..
IMHO the country was more stable when economic growth was more evenly distributed among the states. It is impossible to imagine Cupertino voting for a wreckless wildcard like Trump; this indicates how wide the disparity is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump got a majority of the Cupertino vote in 2024. It’s heavily Chinese, and for some reason, he has a lot of support among the Chinese community. Maybe because he’s been funneling GPUs to the CCP?
> The neo-liberal project that hollowed out American business/manufacturing, the supported ruinous offshoring is composed of traitors to the American people on both sides of the aisle. They should all be prosecuted as such.
Remember it was the American people that have been choosing the (cheaper) offshore manufactured products over the American made ones for decades. There are many products still made in America but in general people buy the cheaper ones made from abroad. And they buy more products - TVs, clothes, Barbie dolls because of it.
The US didn’t need to support China joining the WTO and when it became clear that they were not being a good partner (keeping their domestic markets locked to outsiders, requiring tech and IP transfer, requiring domestic partners over 50%, violating international labor and environmental standards etc) they should have been expelled and their goods blocked from all markets that we could get to align.
That would have cut off a source of cheap production.
The lack of enforcement of the WTO agreement befuddles me. The result has been the polar opposite of these statements from President Clinton:
"Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets—with a fifth of the world’s population, potentially the biggest markets in the world—to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways," said Clinton. In a speech in 2000, Clinton reiterated his hopes:
For the first time, our companies will be able to sell and distribute products in China made by workers here in America without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China, sell through the Chinese government, or transfer valuable technology—for the first time. We’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs."
The American people purchase goods within the trade regime, they don't set the trade regime. The oligarchs and political "elite" set the trade regime for personal and politic benefit.
Clinton March 8th, 2000, Johns Hopkins SAIS
On manufacturing, after saying American companies would for the first time sell and distribute American-made products inside China, he adds that they could do it “without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China.”
On democracy, after noting that China is agreeing to more than buying American goods, he says “it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom.”
With the Trump regime there's been a rather explicit transition from a system of neo-liberal exploitation-with-rules to an out and out oligarchical / corrupt system more analogous to Putin's Russia than Clinton or Obama era US globalized capitalism.
It's .. yes ... worse. Before what you had was an unjust, exploitative, but relatively stable system of rules by which international capitalism operated and in which specific individuals were not allowed to dominate because there was a balancing act of corporate interests, sector by sector, corporation by corporation. If you (not you or I, but corporate entities etc) played by the rules, you might get a chance at the bat.
What's replaced it is outright graft. "Success" is determined by proximity to specific individuals. Success and growth of the overall system is no longer a goal. It's outright "might makes right" politics and what makes it far worse than what came before is not only is it unjust (just like before) for the little guys like you and me.. it is now inherently unstable and prone to collapse.
It's absolutely short termist and interested only in certain families and individuals and maybe sectors.
The people that should be prosecuted are the actual individuals involved.
Also, as a Canadian I'll just say... FUCK Lutnick in particular. Him and Bessent and the whole cabal have made explicit economic war against former "allies" in the name of their own enrichment. It is glorious that they have now have knives out for each other.
Remember it was the American people who have been choosing to consume the (cheaper) food bathed in pesticides over the organic foods....
Remember it was the American people who have been choosing to use the (cheaper) gas with lead over the gas with out lead....
This take smacks of the 'learn to code' vibes that journalists were throwing around at blue collar workers only to cry about it being harassment when it was thrown at them.
Remember, the people who started buying cheap items from China were the same people who's jobs were being shipped to China. Kind of hard for you to afford the more expensive items when you don't have a job or you have switched from a good paying job to a low wage one.
A large portion of the world is resigned to enslavement (through economic and violent coercion and through PR) by megalomaniacs who see the world from a nation-state perspective and who are personally hyper-competitive.
They only want you to see the world from a nation-state perspective.
Meanwhile they're making business and political moves trans-nationally behind the scenes to support their own wealth and power.
Notably those linkages they're making have nothing to do with the "classic" G7 neo-liberal trading alliances and consensus and everything to do mostly with petroleum extraction and real estate, and the entities they control.
We are in agreement. Yes, they are personally hyper-competitive and many are out for personal gain. Many of them do also see the world from the lens of the nation state and want their country to win.
They want nothing more than to use their nation state and nationalism as a pawn for their own personal interests. Some of them, yes, have deluded themselves into thinking they're one and the same (I think Trump himself is like this) but others are very clearly more Machiavellian about this.
Hardly a surprise - the trump administration corruption is well documented. This period is a black eye on every American, and is the opposite of laissez-faire capitalism. Instead of the best succeeding, those who can pander and make connections win (or in this case, be literally family members with a powerful person).
I hope we can move past this with the next admin, and continue to give the upper hand to businesses that want to succeed fairly in the USA.
Corruption is legal in the US - at least relative to other democracies. It takes a lot for anyone to be attacked by the justice system, let alone criticized by newspapers, for giving money to a politician. Look at how Guilfoyle isn't in jail yet (in fact she's out of the press now) despite literally requesting a bribe for 100k.
"Ethics violations" is as far as it goes. We would need a radical overhaul of the legal system, but how can you do that when the patients run the asylum?
That's laissez-faire capitalism. It always devolves into an oligarchy, as it's the only logical endpoint of runaway capital. Free markets create the material conditions that lead to them becoming captured and unfree.
This is exactly the answer, and it's why so-called "libertarianism" is not just naive but destructive (and end-result authoritarian) as an ideology: it has a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "free market" actually is behind the scenes, imagining it as some sort of neutral/neutralizing / democratic mysterious force that prevents accumulation of power and being in opposition to "the State" when it is the opposite. "Free market" systems create the State and then dominate it and the interests involved create power systems for their own accumulation of dominance. And the end result is oligarchy.
The counterveiling force has to be an organized working class that uses unions, political parties, and democratic force to take back at least some control of the state and market and force its use for social means. And this is a constant battle. If we start to lose, which has happened progressively since the 70s, Trumpist oligarchy is the result. Or worse.
I do think that Ayn Randian "objectivism" with its "altruism is a moral defect" is only one bad LSD trip away from just realizing what they really mean is just fully "might makes right", fetishizing power for power's sake, and embracing an explicit fascist ethos as a result.
Ideologically so concerned with identifying repression as a product of "collectivism" (and seeing "collectivism" everywhere) that they've obscured where the real violence lays & the OG violence that led to the establishment of enclosure and property rights in the first instance. Marc Andreesen's weird manifesto some years ago was fully on this path.
In that world view, "liberty" basically comes to mean: "I take your stuff." (and here's some slight of hand on how I've made it ok to do that, and why it's bad if it's the guvmint' that does that instead)
To answer the question, no. I don't think the establishment democrats should be running the country either. They're just the MUCH better of two evils though. I'd prefer new age politicians to be the leaders.
But, do you honestly think Trumps administration didn't materially contribute to making those conditions worse themselves? They basically made the hole so deep it will make it difficult to crawl out of in the first place.
> But, do you honestly think Trumps administration didn't materially contribute to making those conditions worse themselves? They basically made the hole so deep it will make it difficult to crawl out of in the first place.
I agree it made conditions worse. I never denied that.
But I'm also looking at the entire chain of events which led to it. "Lesser of two evils" "voting" literally got us to this point. How could it possibly get us out of it?
"Voting" in scare quotes because as the uniparty link explains, in addition to Dems proving they can't run fair primaries etc, democracy is illusory when corrupted by capital interests.
Ignoring the violent revolution option for obvious reasons, the logical thing to do would be to carefully design and build a new party from the ground up so that it can't succumb to the same levels of corruption that Dems and Repubs have, to disrupt the good cop / bad cop hypnosis that everyone is trapped in.
> "Voting" in scare quotes because as the uniparty link explains, in addition to Dems proving they can't run fair primaries etc, democracy is illusory when corrupted by capital interests.
Good grief, how are Bernie bros still grinding this axe ten years on
My take is that Trump (in the second term) appointed people he thought had expertise to the relevant departments but not to regulating them. He wanted the Secretaries to juice the economy from the Secretary position.
That doesn't, in itself, require corruption. But Trump clearly signaled that corruption would be overlooked so long as it was convenient for his admin (very similar to the Putin-oligarch model).
I half-heartedly wonder how much of what's going on here also involves punishment for Huang's wholehearted defense of open weight models, the purchase of Hugging Face, the release of the Nemotron series, etc.
When you had Lutnick and Bessent and Anthropic and OpenAI explicitly making arguments in the other direction... And e.g. Anthropic's obscene IPO and their success potentially undermined by Chinese (or other, EU etc) open models... Huang's defense of open weights starts to look like outright "disloyalty" in a way the Trump regime has punished heavily in the past.
And given the shift in power after the midterms they may have wanted to execute on this now before they lose control of congress.
The US doesn't allow export of chips to China, but does allow it to rent time on them running in its hemisphere. The Biden admin restricted renting advanced GPU time and the Trump admin relaxed it. Complain all you want, but them's the current _rules_. Rules change all the time, maybe congress will act. (Don't hold your breath.)
So, nary a speedbump to China renting all the Blackwell compute they want, but of course at rental prices. What I see is standard American rent-seeking but scaled to nation-state levels. Scummy, but again them's the _rules_.
Huang and the nVidia board were the ones who (knowingly? allegedly?) allowed their products to actually be smuggled into mainland China via China-controlled asian datacenters. That's a line being crossed - maybe criminal, let's see what happens.
The Lutnick focus in the article is just politics and Epstein obsession. I'm not saying the obsession isn't warranted, and the admin just seems to beg the scrutiny with their choices and appointments.
It's the damnedest thing how they keep everyone talking about Epstein, and in Lutnick's case 9/11 well beyond the normal shelf life of regular news stories. I wonder what the plan is there?
I feel like the entire current administration are the last bagholders in the musical chairs that were connected to exploits (CIA, etc) to arms traders and other nefarious dealers over the past 70 years involving necessary but nasty US activities that protected Americans. They are acting to protect even bigger unseen fish as well...who know who they are - likely some members of the opposing party as well. They were caught dead-to-rights as small time actors in the schemes and were offered a join-or-die proposition. On the way out: guaranteed pardons.
It's pretty clear they're mostly acting in the interests of the oil & gas sector. Which is broadly international and not just American, and also heavily tied into Russia.
So, given climate change: absolutely antithetical to the broader interests of the population and explicitly short-termist.
What's the difference between him and Jensen? I know, Jensen has been speaking out for open source, fighting nationalist propaganda and criticizing the hypocrites from OpenAI who preach safety then release models that break the user's instructions to hack people. Telling the truth makes you dangerous when the ones in charge are liars.
And they can use anti China narratives against him, even if he was born in Taiwan and lived in America for most of his adult life. Racism is at the core of Trump's ideology along with corruption.
All countries can be corrupt. What a lot of African countries unfortunately lack is the strong institutions that make establishing corruption regimes more difficult. There are plenty of examples of corruption in about any country you’d care to study; no people is better than the others.
> Lutnick Pushed to Weaken Chip Rules That Overlap With His Family Business
Buried well below the fold and below two ads, 20pt, 400 weight:
> These dealings are just a tiny portion of Cantor’s business, which stretches from investment banking and trading to real estate. Other investment banks have similar partnerships, and there is no evidence that Cantor’s investments influenced Mr. Lutnick’s deliberations.
Overlap? These interests are barely even tangent. The Commerce Secretary has a background and experience in financial services; that sounds like a good thing compared to some of the other current adminstration qualifications.
I'm sure if you dig just a little, you'll find he's taken positions that benefit the clients of Piper Sandler, Stifel, and Jefferies as well. Because, despite those firms being competitors of Cantor, the Commerce Secretary will often take positions that benefit US commerce. And all of those firms who benefit and a larger than a lemonade stand will be clients of some financial services company/ies.
I feel like NYT's standards used to be higher than that...
> These dealings are just a tiny portion of Cantor’s business, which stretches from investment banking and trading to real estate
So an even larger attack surface for corruption in Mr. Lutnick's Cabinet role.
> The Commerce Secretary has a background and experience in financial services; that sounds like a good thing compared to some of the other current adminstration qualifications.
"Financial services" and commerce, writ large, are not the same thing.
The NYT may well be chasing clicks through its creative use of typography. But the defense of a genuinely offensive and quite possibly corrupt individual like Howard Lutnick isn't a hill I'd prefer to die on.
Corruption is corruption. The fact that he was “only” setting policy to benefit a small portion of his portfolio is not a mitigating factor.
Remember when politicians used to put assets in blind trusts and divest investments that could create even the perception of conflicts of interest?
It’s not the NYT’s standards that have fallen, it’s the American populace’s. “The oligarch billionaire probably only benefitted to the tune of tens of millions” is damning.
I think the argument would be that you don't "wait around" so long to get to the point. Oftentimes a news story can be written with the main point in the headline, summarized in the first paragraph and then really explained using the rest of the article.
It's fair in my mind to complain that you have to read a bunch of fluff (arguably to drive ad impressions) to find the actual news part. I expect that from HuffPo for sure, less so from NYT.
The inverted pyramid is a well documented technique for getting to the point quickly, and if you search it you'll find tons of articles by big name schools and institutions explaining it. Here's one.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/journali...
Which would be a reasonable argument but it's not the one that sokoloff made. They clearly have issues with the accusation that Lutnick is corrupt.
> Overlap? These interests are barely even tangent.
> I feel like NYT's standards used to be higher than that...
You can see there's nothing in their comment that highlights frustration with an ability (or lack of) to find the information they clicked to read about.
Did we read the same first half of the comment? It describes font size and weight of the headline and the font size and weight and how far down the first supporting fact is.
There is then further commentary on how relevant or not relevant the fact is. But the first half of the complaint is literally about the organization and formatting.
Do you understand how English works? The part I quoted is the thesis, the first half is the evidence provided for that. It’s not “further commentary,” it’s the entire thrust of the comment. I genuinely don’t see how you can think the two halves are unrelated.
Exactly. They will do this over and over again like it's their job and it adds up. Nevermind the fact that this small "tens of millions" deal is more than the vast majority will earn in a lifetime. Who in their right mind is dismissing this as something small and meaningless? This guy is screwing everyone over to enrich himself. We need to raise our standards.
Now we have a President making billions while in office and others in his administration like Lutnick here making bank too.
I wonder how long until this post gets flagged off of HN since the usual lackeys will rage flag this and we have no way to vouch for it back like we do with comments
I’m not sure why you felt it was germane to highlight the font size difference between the headline and body of the article. It is following their usual formatting style. You also chose to cherry-pick a tiny section. Here’s the next paragraph:
> But the overlapping relationships are the latest indication of the potential conflicts that exist given Mr. Lutnick’s role in shaping rules around U.S. technology exports. And they demonstrate how the U.S. ban on selling chips directly to China has led to an explosion of data centers in Southeast Asia aimed at Chinese customers. It is now up to Mr. Lutnick to decide whether to tighten the rules in ways that would cut off this avenue.
The article concludes with:
> Still, Cantor Fitzgerald continued to help arrange billions of dollars of financing for industries ranging from data centers to cryptocurrency that depend on a steady supply of computing from Nvidia.
> That includes Bitdeer, which is building out the Malaysian data center it expects to generate $1.7 billion in revenue over five years, according to a company statement.
> That data center will likely serve Tencent, a Chinese internet giant that would be able to gain access to Nvidia’s most advanced A.I. servers, according to a person with knowledge of the arrangement. Bitdeer is part of Nvidia’s partner network, a program for companies that work closely with the chipmaker.
> Bitdeer hosts a Chinese language website that lets customers rent A.I. chips and gain access to Chinese open source A.I. models through data centers in Malaysia, Canada and elsewhere. The Johor facility is one of five data centers the company plans to open in Malaysia in the coming years, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
> Cantor holds a stake in Bitdeer through its investment in Tether, the crypto company. It is far from the only American financial heavyweight investing in overseas data centers. Bain Capital, Citadel and Blackstone have all poured money into A.I. computing clusters across the region.
> Cantor also previously provided financial services to Gorilla Technology, which is building data centers in Thailand and Indonesia, and has a contract to provide A.I. computing to Freyr AI, a Singaporean data center firm that corporate filings and job ads indicate has ties to China.
> Cantor has worked with other Nvidia partners globally, including IREN, an Australian cloud computing company, and Lancium, a Texas data center developer.
> A Commerce Department spokeswoman said that Mr. Lutnick makes policy decisions based on the best interests of the United States. He does not discuss department matters with his sons, nor do they discuss Cantor Fitzgerald business with him, she added.
> Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment. Bitdeer did not reply to a request for comment.
> Mr. Lutnick, as of October 2025, transferred his remaining ownership stake in Cantor to his family. Before that, he had been given what the White House had called a “limited waiver” that allowed him to participate in certain decisions that could have “a direct and predictable effect on Cantor Fitzgerald,” exempting him from a federal criminal law that would otherwise have required him to entirely recuse himself from these discussions.
> Even after Mr. Lutnick finished transferring his ownership stake to his sons late last year, he still had to abide by an ethics rule prohibiting federal employees from using their public office for their private gain or the gain of friends and relatives.
> The Times reported last year that Mr. Lutnick was promoting data center projects that worked with his family firms. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and two dozen other Democratic lawmakers called for an investigation.
It is apparent there is a conflict of interest but the NYT was unable to find an explicit causal connection. The headline is objectively correct and in most administrations of the past, overlapping interests like this would constitute a scandal and would call for further investigation.
Is it corruption when a Commerce recommendation benefits a Cantor client and, I guess, incompetent corruption when it instead benefits clients of Piper Sandler, Stifel, and Jefferies? Or it all Commerce working to further the goals of the country?
If Commerce helps 1000 companies, it's not a problem if Cantor has 5% of the overall market as clients and 4-6% of the companies helped are Cantor clients.
There may very well be corruption here; this article doesn't arrive in the neighborhood of convincing me (I consider myself neither red nor blue, but mostly disgusted with the outcome of the two party system that we seem stuck with.)
Anyone who’s been around Wall Street could have told you Lutnick has had questionable morals and ethics even against subpar standards among finance professionals.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/15/us/pol...
Lutnick is a TRAITOR, he manipulated the system to benefit his company, at the expense of the National Security of the US, by investing in this Malaysian data center which in effect, allowed the Chinese military a source to run their code on Blackwells, and if he's not arrested for treason and a stop put to it, all the next generations of advanced Nvidia GPUs.
Yup. He also took the $7B+ which was meant for Natcast and put it through the NIST CRDO solicitation, as a way to get information and equity from leap-ahead semico technology startups and companies. He is one of the most corrupt individuals in this government, which is abysmally low in this regard in the first place.
Same for Jensen?
I am neither a US nor a Chinese citizen, so I have no stake in either side. But are you truly certain that blocking China’s access to the most advanced gpus is a sound long-term strategy? "Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." (Puzo/Coppola)
Keeping Chinese AI firms dependent on CUDA is good for NVDA, but not for USA. If these were toys for video games then this would be true. But these are strategic assets powering the most consequential technology development of all time. The second these machines started to have national security implications, the strategy changed. The CCP has a long history of aggressively blocking Western entrants to their market. This is maybe a bit heavy handed for taxis and search engines, but it is totally justified and highly advisable for defense tech. It would be foolish for the CCP to not develop their own domestic production for defense technology. Similarly the US would be foolish to not restrict their access to such technologies. Criticizing either side for acting in their obvious interests is a bit unfair, so hence we have the current stand off.
I think that in this case it's about the "rules for thee, but not for me" aspect. If the average U.S. citizen attempted to do what Lutnick allegedly did, the consequences would likely be unpleasant, at best.
And the average US citizen re-elected the poster child president for "rules for thee, but not for me." And IMO if he hadn't started the Iran War, imposed tariffs, and driven inflation through the roof, his approval rating would still be 47%+ like at the beginning of his second term.
He betrayed his coalition. Never do that.
It was 32% of the voting eligible population. The knuckle-draggers are a minority.
And the other 68% decided it wasn't worth voting. And that's a vote for whoever wins.
Yes, silent vote. It's always amusing how the losing side appeals to 'but there were not that many votes' - yours were even less than that.
> are you truly certain that blocking China’s access to the most advanced gpus is a sound long-term strategy?
There is a reasonable debate to be had around the level of limits. But I think it’s clear there need to be some. The idea that China won’t develop a local supplier if we sell to them is a ship that sailed a decade ago. And we’re still unclear on the AI’s future development curve—if it looks like what some proponents believe, it would make sense to preserve every advantage we have.
Would you apply this logic to other tech too?
Why not just give them everything that gets invented?
it's a good question. This is appears to be a nuanced and recent analysis:
https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/2026-...
Rethinking Export Controls as a Tool in Modern Technology Competition, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Should we sell them F-35s to "keep them closer"? Sell them our most advanced defense technology to "keep them closer"?
Cantor & Fitzgerald is deep state associated and handles Tether's collateral after taking over from the CIA Deltec bank.
This could be approved operations to get Chinese companies to run their models in controlled data centers. The only hole in this theory is that the NYT would not print this if it were the case.
The disgust for the personality in other comments here is justified. But the broader picture is that Wexner, Lutnick and Epstein have always been deep state adjacent. In the early days Bears Stearns handle slush funds and laundering, then Cantor & Fitzgerald, now Bitcoing/Tether.
If you just focus on the personality there'll be another Lutnick soon.
I thought we got rid of the "deep state", do we need to elect even bigger morons now?
The American people voted for a clown and got the circus.
Unwinding it all takes. at best, another 2 years.
I get it, these people are pretty terrible, but some reflection and soul-searching is needed. Why is such a large group so gullible/dumb/desperate and how has society/traditional republicans/democrats failed them? How did it come to this?
>> The American people voted for a clown
I would like to note, the clown is a convicted felon, and a convicted sex offender. Something known at the time of the second elections, by the millions who voted for him.
> Unwinding it all takes. at best, another 2 years.
If other countries go back to trusting anything the U.S. says in just 2 years, I’d be gobsmacked.
Don't forget he's also a pedophile
He seems to have been a friend of Epstein’s but I can’t see that he is accused of anything further than that?
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7jm7k7pxzo
Lutnick most certainly wasn't acting alone. The truth of the matter is that The neo-liberal project that hollowed out American business/manufacturing, the supported ruinous offshoring is composed of traitors to the American people on both sides of the aisle. They should all be prosecuted as such.
One at a time. Or one infractional group at a time at least. Otherwise you have too many rabbits and catch none.
Just as long as we don't give a pass to those who might loudly complain about this, while just flagrantly looting in different ways (eg Grump himself). At this point I think most people recognize the original decades-old problem even if we disagree on specifics. The real difficulty is that the political banner of opposition to neoliberalism has also been captured by that same class of shot-term anti-patriotic looter, merely running a different/newer con job.
Like in 2026, we don't really need to worry about domestic industries and production lines getting shipping to China. That has basically run its course, and while it would be great to work on rebuilding our industries, nobody really has a plan for doing that beyond hopium. The active attack we do need to worry about is further destruction of what still remains of the decentralized US economy, in favor of rolling up ever more activity into megacorps (through high prices on energy and raw goods, open political favoritism, continued regulatory capture, etc).
> The real difficulty is that the political banner of opposition to neoliberalism has also been captured by that same class of shot-term anti-patriotic looter, merely running a different/newer con job.
Agreed. They need to go as well.
> What we do need to worry about is further destruction of what still remains of the decentralized US economy, in favor of rolling up ever more activity into megacorps (through high prices on energy and raw goods, open political favoritism, continued regulatory capture, etc).
Sure, but we also need to do our own infrastructure buildup, offshoring hasn't run it's course, we still have places all over the country with no real economic prospects. There has to be something for that alongside bringing the megacorps to heel.
not saying it’s necessarily a good thing but offshoring and financialization enabled American companies like Apple to retain a much larger chunk of profits and return more wealth to shareholders, who in turn recycled that money back into American assets, lowered cost of capital, raised valuations, funded startups that raised tech salaries and pulled global talent at the expense of other countries
In an alternate universe, keeping manufacturing industries and jobs onshore would likely have come at the expense of American dominance and high salaries in tech, and higher cost consumer goods - probably not a huge deal to most people
> but offshoring and financialization enabled American companies like Apple to retain a much larger chunk of profits and return more wealth to shareholders, who in turn recycled that money back into American assets, lowered cost of capital, raised valuations, funded startups that raised tech salaries and pulled global talent at the expense of other countries
So trickle down, but it only helps a small number of people in a handful of coastal cities? And imports people into the US to then take work from citizens?
And even that is no longer really happening (except for the importing people to take work from citizens), and hasn't for a few years now (not sure if you've seen the tech job market at the moment). Yes, there was a brief period of time that a few technologists were making 6 figures starting..
> So trickle down, but it only helps a small number of people in a handful of coastal cities?
Ban iPhone imports for 6 months and see if it only helps a "small number of people in a handful of coastal cities"
IMHO the country was more stable when economic growth was more evenly distributed among the states. It is impossible to imagine Cupertino voting for a wreckless wildcard like Trump; this indicates how wide the disparity is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump got a majority of the Cupertino vote in 2024. It’s heavily Chinese, and for some reason, he has a lot of support among the Chinese community. Maybe because he’s been funneling GPUs to the CCP?
> I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump got a majority of the Cupertino vote in 2024.
Cupertino was +44 for Harris in 2024
https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/sov/2024-general/ssov/pres-...
> The neo-liberal project that hollowed out American business/manufacturing, the supported ruinous offshoring is composed of traitors to the American people on both sides of the aisle. They should all be prosecuted as such.
Remember it was the American people that have been choosing the (cheaper) offshore manufactured products over the American made ones for decades. There are many products still made in America but in general people buy the cheaper ones made from abroad. And they buy more products - TVs, clothes, Barbie dolls because of it.
Who exactly should be prosecuted?
The US didn’t need to support China joining the WTO and when it became clear that they were not being a good partner (keeping their domestic markets locked to outsiders, requiring tech and IP transfer, requiring domestic partners over 50%, violating international labor and environmental standards etc) they should have been expelled and their goods blocked from all markets that we could get to align.
That would have cut off a source of cheap production.
The lack of enforcement of the WTO agreement befuddles me. The result has been the polar opposite of these statements from President Clinton:
"Economically, this agreement is the equivalent of a one-way street. It requires China to open its markets—with a fifth of the world’s population, potentially the biggest markets in the world—to both our products and services in unprecedented new ways," said Clinton. In a speech in 2000, Clinton reiterated his hopes:
For the first time, our companies will be able to sell and distribute products in China made by workers here in America without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China, sell through the Chinese government, or transfer valuable technology—for the first time. We’ll be able to export products without exporting jobs."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93China_Re...
The American people purchase goods within the trade regime, they don't set the trade regime. The oligarchs and political "elite" set the trade regime for personal and politic benefit.
Clinton March 8th, 2000, Johns Hopkins SAIS
On manufacturing, after saying American companies would for the first time sell and distribute American-made products inside China, he adds that they could do it “without being forced to relocate manufacturing to China.”
On democracy, after noting that China is agreeing to more than buying American goods, he says “it is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom.”
With the Trump regime there's been a rather explicit transition from a system of neo-liberal exploitation-with-rules to an out and out oligarchical / corrupt system more analogous to Putin's Russia than Clinton or Obama era US globalized capitalism.
It's .. yes ... worse. Before what you had was an unjust, exploitative, but relatively stable system of rules by which international capitalism operated and in which specific individuals were not allowed to dominate because there was a balancing act of corporate interests, sector by sector, corporation by corporation. If you (not you or I, but corporate entities etc) played by the rules, you might get a chance at the bat.
What's replaced it is outright graft. "Success" is determined by proximity to specific individuals. Success and growth of the overall system is no longer a goal. It's outright "might makes right" politics and what makes it far worse than what came before is not only is it unjust (just like before) for the little guys like you and me.. it is now inherently unstable and prone to collapse.
It's absolutely short termist and interested only in certain families and individuals and maybe sectors.
The people that should be prosecuted are the actual individuals involved.
Also, as a Canadian I'll just say... FUCK Lutnick in particular. Him and Bessent and the whole cabal have made explicit economic war against former "allies" in the name of their own enrichment. It is glorious that they have now have knives out for each other.
Remember it was the American people who have been choosing to consume the (cheaper) food bathed in pesticides over the organic foods....
Remember it was the American people who have been choosing to use the (cheaper) gas with lead over the gas with out lead....
This take smacks of the 'learn to code' vibes that journalists were throwing around at blue collar workers only to cry about it being harassment when it was thrown at them.
Remember, the people who started buying cheap items from China were the same people who's jobs were being shipped to China. Kind of hard for you to afford the more expensive items when you don't have a job or you have switched from a good paying job to a low wage one.
But but aren't you thoroughly placated now that TVs are a cheap commodity?
You know he won't be arrested right?
A large portion of the world is resigned to enslavement (through economic and violent coercion and through PR) by megalomaniacs who see the world from a nation-state perspective and who are personally hyper-competitive.
They only want you to see the world from a nation-state perspective.
Meanwhile they're making business and political moves trans-nationally behind the scenes to support their own wealth and power.
Notably those linkages they're making have nothing to do with the "classic" G7 neo-liberal trading alliances and consensus and everything to do mostly with petroleum extraction and real estate, and the entities they control.
We are in agreement. Yes, they are personally hyper-competitive and many are out for personal gain. Many of them do also see the world from the lens of the nation state and want their country to win.
They want nothing more than to use their nation state and nationalism as a pawn for their own personal interests. Some of them, yes, have deluded themselves into thinking they're one and the same (I think Trump himself is like this) but others are very clearly more Machiavellian about this.
It's all just "might makes right" shit.
Does it ever stop with this administration?
Nope. And the things we don't know are probably orders of magnitude worse.
Hardly a surprise - the trump administration corruption is well documented. This period is a black eye on every American, and is the opposite of laissez-faire capitalism. Instead of the best succeeding, those who can pander and make connections win (or in this case, be literally family members with a powerful person).
I hope we can move past this with the next admin, and continue to give the upper hand to businesses that want to succeed fairly in the USA.
Corruption is legal in the US - at least relative to other democracies. It takes a lot for anyone to be attacked by the justice system, let alone criticized by newspapers, for giving money to a politician. Look at how Guilfoyle isn't in jail yet (in fact she's out of the press now) despite literally requesting a bribe for 100k.
"Ethics violations" is as far as it goes. We would need a radical overhaul of the legal system, but how can you do that when the patients run the asylum?
> Look at how Guilfoyle isn't in jail yet
The statute of limitations gives the next administration a year to indict her.
That's laissez-faire capitalism. It always devolves into an oligarchy, as it's the only logical endpoint of runaway capital. Free markets create the material conditions that lead to them becoming captured and unfree.
This is exactly the answer, and it's why so-called "libertarianism" is not just naive but destructive (and end-result authoritarian) as an ideology: it has a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "free market" actually is behind the scenes, imagining it as some sort of neutral/neutralizing / democratic mysterious force that prevents accumulation of power and being in opposition to "the State" when it is the opposite. "Free market" systems create the State and then dominate it and the interests involved create power systems for their own accumulation of dominance. And the end result is oligarchy.
The counterveiling force has to be an organized working class that uses unions, political parties, and democratic force to take back at least some control of the state and market and force its use for social means. And this is a constant battle. If we start to lose, which has happened progressively since the 70s, Trumpist oligarchy is the result. Or worse.
> This is exactly the answer, and it's why so-called "libertarianism" is not just naive but destructive (and end-result authoritarian)
Its why I can have some respect for the Dark Enlightenment guys. At least they take their idea of libertarianism to its natural conclusion.
I mean, "respect" is one way of framing it.
I do think that Ayn Randian "objectivism" with its "altruism is a moral defect" is only one bad LSD trip away from just realizing what they really mean is just fully "might makes right", fetishizing power for power's sake, and embracing an explicit fascist ethos as a result.
Ideologically so concerned with identifying repression as a product of "collectivism" (and seeing "collectivism" everywhere) that they've obscured where the real violence lays & the OG violence that led to the establishment of enclosure and property rights in the first instance. Marc Andreesen's weird manifesto some years ago was fully on this path.
In that world view, "liberty" basically comes to mean: "I take your stuff." (and here's some slight of hand on how I've made it ok to do that, and why it's bad if it's the guvmint' that does that instead)
Right, because late stage capitalism was working so flawlessly prior to Trump.
https://archive.is/wSmtd
You're right, its exponentially worse.
That make you happy?
So you want to return to the conditions that led to an exponentially worse situation?
That's precisely what a party of controlled opposition would do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniparty
To answer the question, no. I don't think the establishment democrats should be running the country either. They're just the MUCH better of two evils though. I'd prefer new age politicians to be the leaders.
But, do you honestly think Trumps administration didn't materially contribute to making those conditions worse themselves? They basically made the hole so deep it will make it difficult to crawl out of in the first place.
> But, do you honestly think Trumps administration didn't materially contribute to making those conditions worse themselves? They basically made the hole so deep it will make it difficult to crawl out of in the first place.
I agree it made conditions worse. I never denied that.
But I'm also looking at the entire chain of events which led to it. "Lesser of two evils" "voting" literally got us to this point. How could it possibly get us out of it?
"Voting" in scare quotes because as the uniparty link explains, in addition to Dems proving they can't run fair primaries etc, democracy is illusory when corrupted by capital interests.
Ignoring the violent revolution option for obvious reasons, the logical thing to do would be to carefully design and build a new party from the ground up so that it can't succumb to the same levels of corruption that Dems and Repubs have, to disrupt the good cop / bad cop hypnosis that everyone is trapped in.
> "Voting" in scare quotes because as the uniparty link explains, in addition to Dems proving they can't run fair primaries etc, democracy is illusory when corrupted by capital interests.
Good grief, how are Bernie bros still grinding this axe ten years on
Because it’s a legitimate “axe to grind” that has not been addressed?
A vote is earned and not given, regardless of how loudly the “vote blue no matter who” argues (shouts?) otherwise every election cycle.
> Good grief, how are Bernie bros still grinding this axe ten years on
Good grief, how corrupt/delusional enablers are still denying facts ten years on.
Also, even post-Bernie, why do you think voters were entirely denied a primary the most recent time around?
The best Dems could do was install a proven unpopular pick and act surprised when she lost.
The alternative to lesser of two evils voting is greater of two evils voting.
Well the people that do vote will continue to dictate everything and you can keep posting about it.
I'll vote for whoever isn't a corruption enabler.
But I also don't look down on those who are aware of the above and elect to not vote as a result.
Not voting is itself a vote, in this climate.
Yeah that worked flawlessly with trump, didn't it
Looks like you misread the above thread.
Do people still not see through his appointment? it's crystal clear to me
My take is that Trump (in the second term) appointed people he thought had expertise to the relevant departments but not to regulating them. He wanted the Secretaries to juice the economy from the Secretary position.
That doesn't, in itself, require corruption. But Trump clearly signaled that corruption would be overlooked so long as it was convenient for his admin (very similar to the Putin-oligarch model).
And taking Jensen down was another example of a Putin style oligarch model. The only reason for him to step down so suddenly was threat of prison.
I half-heartedly wonder how much of what's going on here also involves punishment for Huang's wholehearted defense of open weight models, the purchase of Hugging Face, the release of the Nemotron series, etc.
When you had Lutnick and Bessent and Anthropic and OpenAI explicitly making arguments in the other direction... And e.g. Anthropic's obscene IPO and their success potentially undermined by Chinese (or other, EU etc) open models... Huang's defense of open weights starts to look like outright "disloyalty" in a way the Trump regime has punished heavily in the past.
And given the shift in power after the midterms they may have wanted to execute on this now before they lose control of congress.
The US doesn't allow export of chips to China, but does allow it to rent time on them running in its hemisphere. The Biden admin restricted renting advanced GPU time and the Trump admin relaxed it. Complain all you want, but them's the current _rules_. Rules change all the time, maybe congress will act. (Don't hold your breath.)
So, nary a speedbump to China renting all the Blackwell compute they want, but of course at rental prices. What I see is standard American rent-seeking but scaled to nation-state levels. Scummy, but again them's the _rules_.
Huang and the nVidia board were the ones who (knowingly? allegedly?) allowed their products to actually be smuggled into mainland China via China-controlled asian datacenters. That's a line being crossed - maybe criminal, let's see what happens.
The Lutnick focus in the article is just politics and Epstein obsession. I'm not saying the obsession isn't warranted, and the admin just seems to beg the scrutiny with their choices and appointments.
It's the damnedest thing how they keep everyone talking about Epstein, and in Lutnick's case 9/11 well beyond the normal shelf life of regular news stories. I wonder what the plan is there?
I feel like the entire current administration are the last bagholders in the musical chairs that were connected to exploits (CIA, etc) to arms traders and other nefarious dealers over the past 70 years involving necessary but nasty US activities that protected Americans. They are acting to protect even bigger unseen fish as well...who know who they are - likely some members of the opposing party as well. They were caught dead-to-rights as small time actors in the schemes and were offered a join-or-die proposition. On the way out: guaranteed pardons.
It's pretty clear they're mostly acting in the interests of the oil & gas sector. Which is broadly international and not just American, and also heavily tied into Russia.
So, given climate change: absolutely antithetical to the broader interests of the population and explicitly short-termist.
Watch the American public forget all about this corruption, fall for the culture war bait and re-elect Republicans again in a few years
What's the difference between him and Jensen? I know, Jensen has been speaking out for open source, fighting nationalist propaganda and criticizing the hypocrites from OpenAI who preach safety then release models that break the user's instructions to hack people. Telling the truth makes you dangerous when the ones in charge are liars.
And they can use anti China narratives against him, even if he was born in Taiwan and lived in America for most of his adult life. Racism is at the core of Trump's ideology along with corruption.
at a point in time - I thought us africans were corrupt - till the trump crime family came along.
every appointment is doing some sort of grift
> I thought us africans were corrupt
All countries can be corrupt. What a lot of African countries unfortunately lack is the strong institutions that make establishing corruption regimes more difficult. There are plenty of examples of corruption in about any country you’d care to study; no people is better than the others.
So, evidently, does the USA, which is what the GP was sardonically observing.
It's corruption, crime and grift at every opportunity down to every social media post.
How much market manipulation in every tweet threatening to double or delay tarrifs, launch or delay attacks on Iran?
Does MAGA want to somehow forget this term started with a multibillion dollar Trump shitcoin rugpull?
It's fucking disgusting how naked the corruption has been from the criminal Trump family and admin.
Trevor Noah called Trump our first African president back in 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FPrJxTvgdQ
What happens when supposedly smart people cozy up to corruption and fascism. Could be a theme. Could be a pattern. Could be first of several.
NYT Headline, 40pt, 700 weight:
> Lutnick Pushed to Weaken Chip Rules That Overlap With His Family Business
Buried well below the fold and below two ads, 20pt, 400 weight:
> These dealings are just a tiny portion of Cantor’s business, which stretches from investment banking and trading to real estate. Other investment banks have similar partnerships, and there is no evidence that Cantor’s investments influenced Mr. Lutnick’s deliberations.
Overlap? These interests are barely even tangent. The Commerce Secretary has a background and experience in financial services; that sounds like a good thing compared to some of the other current adminstration qualifications.
I'm sure if you dig just a little, you'll find he's taken positions that benefit the clients of Piper Sandler, Stifel, and Jefferies as well. Because, despite those firms being competitors of Cantor, the Commerce Secretary will often take positions that benefit US commerce. And all of those firms who benefit and a larger than a lemonade stand will be clients of some financial services company/ies.
I feel like NYT's standards used to be higher than that...
> These dealings are just a tiny portion of Cantor’s business, which stretches from investment banking and trading to real estate
So an even larger attack surface for corruption in Mr. Lutnick's Cabinet role.
> The Commerce Secretary has a background and experience in financial services; that sounds like a good thing compared to some of the other current adminstration qualifications.
"Financial services" and commerce, writ large, are not the same thing.
The NYT may well be chasing clicks through its creative use of typography. But the defense of a genuinely offensive and quite possibly corrupt individual like Howard Lutnick isn't a hill I'd prefer to die on.
Corruption is corruption. The fact that he was “only” setting policy to benefit a small portion of his portfolio is not a mitigating factor.
Remember when politicians used to put assets in blind trusts and divest investments that could create even the perception of conflicts of interest?
It’s not the NYT’s standards that have fallen, it’s the American populace’s. “The oligarch billionaire probably only benefitted to the tune of tens of millions” is damning.
Cantor openly advertises its connection to the administration: https://www.cantor.com/howard-lutnicks-sons-score-record-yea...
That is literally from Cantor’s website.
I think the argument would be that you don't "wait around" so long to get to the point. Oftentimes a news story can be written with the main point in the headline, summarized in the first paragraph and then really explained using the rest of the article.
It's fair in my mind to complain that you have to read a bunch of fluff (arguably to drive ad impressions) to find the actual news part. I expect that from HuffPo for sure, less so from NYT.
The inverted pyramid is a well documented technique for getting to the point quickly, and if you search it you'll find tons of articles by big name schools and institutions explaining it. Here's one. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/journali...
Which would be a reasonable argument but it's not the one that sokoloff made. They clearly have issues with the accusation that Lutnick is corrupt.
> Overlap? These interests are barely even tangent.
> I feel like NYT's standards used to be higher than that...
You can see there's nothing in their comment that highlights frustration with an ability (or lack of) to find the information they clicked to read about.
Did we read the same first half of the comment? It describes font size and weight of the headline and the font size and weight and how far down the first supporting fact is.
There is then further commentary on how relevant or not relevant the fact is. But the first half of the complaint is literally about the organization and formatting.
Do you understand how English works? The part I quoted is the thesis, the first half is the evidence provided for that. It’s not “further commentary,” it’s the entire thrust of the comment. I genuinely don’t see how you can think the two halves are unrelated.
Exactly. They will do this over and over again like it's their job and it adds up. Nevermind the fact that this small "tens of millions" deal is more than the vast majority will earn in a lifetime. Who in their right mind is dismissing this as something small and meaningless? This guy is screwing everyone over to enrich himself. We need to raise our standards.
They made Carter sell his family peanut farm.
Now we have a President making billions while in office and others in his administration like Lutnick here making bank too.
I wonder how long until this post gets flagged off of HN since the usual lackeys will rage flag this and we have no way to vouch for it back like we do with comments
I’m not sure why you felt it was germane to highlight the font size difference between the headline and body of the article. It is following their usual formatting style. You also chose to cherry-pick a tiny section. Here’s the next paragraph:
> But the overlapping relationships are the latest indication of the potential conflicts that exist given Mr. Lutnick’s role in shaping rules around U.S. technology exports. And they demonstrate how the U.S. ban on selling chips directly to China has led to an explosion of data centers in Southeast Asia aimed at Chinese customers. It is now up to Mr. Lutnick to decide whether to tighten the rules in ways that would cut off this avenue.
The article concludes with:
> Still, Cantor Fitzgerald continued to help arrange billions of dollars of financing for industries ranging from data centers to cryptocurrency that depend on a steady supply of computing from Nvidia.
> That includes Bitdeer, which is building out the Malaysian data center it expects to generate $1.7 billion in revenue over five years, according to a company statement.
> That data center will likely serve Tencent, a Chinese internet giant that would be able to gain access to Nvidia’s most advanced A.I. servers, according to a person with knowledge of the arrangement. Bitdeer is part of Nvidia’s partner network, a program for companies that work closely with the chipmaker.
> Bitdeer hosts a Chinese language website that lets customers rent A.I. chips and gain access to Chinese open source A.I. models through data centers in Malaysia, Canada and elsewhere. The Johor facility is one of five data centers the company plans to open in Malaysia in the coming years, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
> Cantor holds a stake in Bitdeer through its investment in Tether, the crypto company. It is far from the only American financial heavyweight investing in overseas data centers. Bain Capital, Citadel and Blackstone have all poured money into A.I. computing clusters across the region.
> Cantor also previously provided financial services to Gorilla Technology, which is building data centers in Thailand and Indonesia, and has a contract to provide A.I. computing to Freyr AI, a Singaporean data center firm that corporate filings and job ads indicate has ties to China.
> Cantor has worked with other Nvidia partners globally, including IREN, an Australian cloud computing company, and Lancium, a Texas data center developer.
> A Commerce Department spokeswoman said that Mr. Lutnick makes policy decisions based on the best interests of the United States. He does not discuss department matters with his sons, nor do they discuss Cantor Fitzgerald business with him, she added.
> Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment. Bitdeer did not reply to a request for comment.
> Mr. Lutnick, as of October 2025, transferred his remaining ownership stake in Cantor to his family. Before that, he had been given what the White House had called a “limited waiver” that allowed him to participate in certain decisions that could have “a direct and predictable effect on Cantor Fitzgerald,” exempting him from a federal criminal law that would otherwise have required him to entirely recuse himself from these discussions.
> Even after Mr. Lutnick finished transferring his ownership stake to his sons late last year, he still had to abide by an ethics rule prohibiting federal employees from using their public office for their private gain or the gain of friends and relatives.
> The Times reported last year that Mr. Lutnick was promoting data center projects that worked with his family firms. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and two dozen other Democratic lawmakers called for an investigation.
It is apparent there is a conflict of interest but the NYT was unable to find an explicit causal connection. The headline is objectively correct and in most administrations of the past, overlapping interests like this would constitute a scandal and would call for further investigation.
I'm shocked to hear that NYT is using a larger font size for the headline than the rest of the article.
I bet if you examine those other businesses, they too would "overlap" with his positions.
But you know, cherry pick what you dont want to hear.
The cherry-picking is the exact problem.
Is it corruption when a Commerce recommendation benefits a Cantor client and, I guess, incompetent corruption when it instead benefits clients of Piper Sandler, Stifel, and Jefferies? Or it all Commerce working to further the goals of the country?
If Commerce helps 1000 companies, it's not a problem if Cantor has 5% of the overall market as clients and 4-6% of the companies helped are Cantor clients.
There may very well be corruption here; this article doesn't arrive in the neighborhood of convincing me (I consider myself neither red nor blue, but mostly disgusted with the outcome of the two party system that we seem stuck with.)