Santa Clara, March 14, 2029.
Four objects on Jensen's desk.
An NSA report, face down.
Kai Chen's badge.
An iPhone, screen lit: "The White House...
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This is the macro version of what I've been writing at the corporate level — same pattern, different scale. Signals everywhere, nobody reading them, and by the time they do it's too late.
The "it was all there" refrain hit harder every time. Curious — did you build this from the AMD precedent outward, or did the 2029 image come first?
The 2029 image came first. Jensen at the desk, four objects, a number on the screen. The AMD precedent came in to answer the question the image raised: how does a company that invented the playbook end up on the wrong side of it?
The refrain came last — or rather, it emerged. Once the structure was backwards chronology, "it was all there" became the only honest thing to say at each layer. Not a rhetorical device. More like a verdict.
Your corporate version sounds like the same mechanism at a different zoom level. The signals are always readable in hindsight. The question that keeps me up is whether they're actually unreadable in real time — or just inconvenient.
"Inconvenient" — that's the one. 17 stories in, every single one had someone who saw it coming. Not in hindsight. Right there, in the room. Couldn't make it stick because the person who needed to hear it didn't want to.
That's why your "it was all there" lands so hard. It's not irony. It's just how decisions actually work.
Good to know the image came first — explains why the piece feels so tight. Might steal that order next time.
"Couldn't make it stick because the person who needed to hear it didn't want to."
That's the sentence I was circling around the whole time. Jensen knew. Said it out loud, in front of cameras. It changed nothing — because knowing and acting are separated by something that has nothing to do with information.
Steal the order. Image first, precedent second, refrain last. Works because the ending is already written when you start — you're just building the archaeology backwards.
Would read those 17 stories.
Means a lot coming from someone who wrote that piece. Here's the series — same pattern, different zoom level:
AI, Ego & Regret
Fair warning: 17 is what's published. There's a backlog. This format is hard to stop once you start digging.
17 published and a backlog. That's the tell — when the format starts pulling you forward instead of you pushing it.
Reading.
Very insightful and very true. During the mining boom, manufacturers were incentivized to not sell to China, so China built their own mining-capable chips. Fast forward, they built almost everything from scratch, because Western companies didnt want competition... Now they have competition they cant hope to beat. The difference is Nvidia and AMD built chips for 30 years, China built them over 10 years. Technical debt, environmental constraints, backwards compatibility, overfocus on ecosystem locking themselves into oblivion. While China built their own operating system, their own chips, modernized and optimized for each workload they faced. The difference? Cheaper. China manufactured 60% performance chips at scales unmatched, they reverse engineered and even upgraded legacy Nvidia chips to support memory types they were never designed to, rewrote firmware for those chips to support more vram than ever spec'd for. Fast forward some more, they have competitive chips in every sector, with a deep vendetta against the US firms and nation for blocking their progress in fear of competition.
While at peace, the US and China are fighting a shadow war on the compute front. And to the public, the US is winning, they're always winning... In reality, they know they lost the day they passed those sanctions. Starved of frontiers, engineers seek new horizons and often come across some pretty interesting stuff along the way. Take V.E.L.O.C.I.T.Y. OS's NDA-KV and NDA 2 bit quantization, optimizations driven by necessity, not desire. Written on a laptop, but designed for data centers. Not because I could, but because of a back injury, I couldnt sit at my PC. Restrictions breed intrigue and intrigue always finds loopholes and unexplored avenues that often times fix fundamental flaws in "It's good enough", because what's good enough on a modern day high-end gpu, is not good enough on an aging MX250 and it shows.
Great piece of writing @pascal_cescato_692b7a8a20 love the hint at the annoying orange with "we're winning, it's fake news" 😂
"Written on a laptop, but designed for data centers. Not because I could, but because of a back injury."
That's the sentence. Constraint doesn't care about your setup — it just removes the option of "good enough" and sees what's left.
The mining boom angle is one I didn't put in the piece but probably should have — it's an earlier iteration of the exact same loop. Blocked, built, outpaced. The vendetta part is real too, and it's the variable nobody in the boardrooms seems to price in.
Glad the annoying orange landed. Caricature writes itself sometimes.
The mining boom is very important not to miss, because it was the origin of the whole race. Due to the restrictions and the vast amount of profits to be had in the crypto boom, China invested heavily into R&D for systems that could mine, not just bitcoin (SHA-256), but also Ethereum, which required a GPU, so they had no choice but to build optimized GPUs, modify old ones to support more and newer memory chips, so they could get every last penny out of it.
What's another interesting angle on it is the seizure of cryptominers' hardware in China at the time, when the legislation passed. Unlike western nations where such seizure would be well documented and made public what happens to the hardware once seized, in China it just dropped into a black hole essentially. (My theory) It's possible that after seizure, the CCP ran those mining rigs themselves, to fund their national R&D into building faster, more advanced systems and to supplement their datacenters which were falling behind after the restrictions. The reality is that in blocking the crypto miners from buying gpus, they also blocked datacenters from buying theirs... So 1 hand washed the other and the crypto cards seized were used to both fund R&D and maintain infrastructure, as the mining was just the face of it, the shadow war at the time was the start of what would become the AI war, where western nations accelerated their own R&D through use of early revision AIs, China was starved of this advancements, so they built their own, now we have models like Qwen, Deepseek, Kimi, all from China, all because they had to, not because they wanted to. Thankfully, not all companies were as restrictive, though they still safeguarded against reverse engineering, eg. Meta with their Llama models, open for use, but no source on the data they used to train them, meaning you could use it, but you couldnt learn from it.
The seized rigs theory is unverifiable — and exactly the kind of thing that would never be verified. Which is its own kind of signal.
But the Meta/Llama distinction is the one that sticks. Open weights, closed training data. You can use the car, you can't learn to build the engine. It's a more sophisticated form of the same lock-in instinct — just dressed as openness.
The crypto boom as origin story for the AI hardware race is the thread I left out. You're right that it's not optional — it's where the incentive structure crystallized. Mining → seizure → R&D → Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi. The line is straight once you draw it.
You should write this.
Agreed on the unverifiable nature of it. Though one could probably trace a known miner's wallet from back then and trace the account hops to see if they ever lead to any purchases to individuals for compute hardware... Wouldnt show the seizure of the hardware being used, but could paint a picture of what the seized crypto was used for?
Cyber sleuths assemble! Find that Crypto.
The car and engine is a good analogy, in software it would be akin to MS Office. You can write an excel file, you can even use the API, but you cant read the source code, so you cant build your own from their assembled code.
The thing with the seizure, is it's impossible that the systems were decommissioned... No company, let alone nation, would willingly throw away hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware, let alone modern high-end hardware, amidst sanctions that prevent them from buying in their own... So let the individuals source the high end hardware, then seize it, along with the crypto it produced, if they reveal their channels of acquiring the hardware, let them keep the crypto, in exchanged for acting as a sourcing agent.
In theory it makes the most sense out of any outcome from the seizure, yet proving it is impossible, unless 1 of those seized accounts can be traced.
The wallet trace angle is the only one that could produce anything verifiable — and even then you'd need someone with the time, the tools, and no better use for a weekend.
The sourcing agent theory is elegant. Too elegant, maybe — but "too elegant to be false" is exactly how these things work when nobody's incentivized to look.
The MS Office analogy is sharper than the car one. You can interoperate, you can't learn. That's the real lock.
Someone should write the investigation version of this. Not me — I write fiction.
This landed differently after spending today writing about the infrastructure gap from a developer's side — the diesel generators, the latency, what that 1% means if you're building in Lagos right now.
That angle didn't make it into the text — and it should have.
The 1% from Santa Clara is a postmortem. The 1% from Lagos is something else entirely: the moment the infrastructure gap stops being a gap and starts being an advantage. No legacy stack. No CUDA debt. Just the HX-9 Pro and a generator that already knows how to run lean.
Would read that piece.
Pascal, the lean infrastructure angle is the one I keep coming back to. the generator that already runs lean isn't a workaround .
it's a design constraint that produces different instincts. developers here already know how to build for unreliable conditions. That's not nothing when the HX-9 Pro lands and everyone else is migrating off CUDA.
The piece is half-written already. might be the next one.
"The generator that already runs lean isn't a workaround. It's a design constraint that produces different instincts."
That's the thesis. Right there.
The developers who spent years optimizing for MX250s and diesel generators don't need to unlearn anything when the HX-9 Pro lands. They're already thinking in constraints. The CUDA crowd has to migrate — mentally before they even touch the hardware.
Write it. I'll read it.
Pascal, "mentally before they even touch the hardware" is the line. that's the migration nobody is measuring and it's already happened here by necessity.
writing it....
Waiting for it.
What I found most interesting wasn't even the geopolitical prediction, it was the recurring line, "It was all there."
It made the story feel less like a warning about one company and more like a pattern that keeps repeating. Someone notices the signals early, the information exists, but incentives make acting on it much harder than seeing it.
I also liked how the piece was structured backwards. Starting with the 1% and then slowly uncovering how every decision led there made it feel more like reading an investigation than a prediction.
Really enjoyed this one.
"Incentives make acting on it much harder than seeing it."
That's the line I was looking for when I wrote it and couldn't quite land. You got there in one sentence.
The backwards structure was the only honest way to tell it — a prediction pretends to know the future, an investigation just follows the evidence back. The evidence was always there. That's what makes it uncomfortable.
Glad it landed.
0.99%
ughh..
good post!
0.99% — and falling.
Thanks.
This post slaps. Especially this one line:
True words brother. Relevant to so many things not just in tech, but in life in general. 🦾