Kevin Xu
@kevinsxu
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Building/Investing @ Interconnected Capital; Writing @interconnect_ed ; ex. GitHub, PingCAP, Obama White House/Commerce Dept; suffering #Canucks fan
www
Joined March 2009
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1/ Morris Chang gave a sobering speech at the TSMC Arizona fab opening ceremony
He proclaimed that "globalization is almost dead" and this is just "the end of the beginning"
Sadly no one listened; no covered the speech
Here's my transcript of what he said in a thread🧵👇
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Jensen Huang, two days after Nvidia's historic quarterly earnings, flew to Taiwan to deliver the commencement speech at National Taiwan University
Not MIT. Not Harvard. NTU.
He didn't talk about his wealth or success
Instead, he shared 3 near-death Nvidia stories and painted a…
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Who knew bikini model calendars would be the reason why America can't onshore advanced chip manufacturing...
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Me: Hi Senator Obama, I’m Kevin, a field organizer here in the Charlotte field office.
Obama: hey Kev, you look like an organizer!
He would know. He was one.
That was the last day anyone ever called him a “Senator”.
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When asked about the cost gap between its Arizona fabs and Taiwan fabs during $TSM earnings call, here was what Wendell Huang, its CFO, had to say:
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Lee Kai-Fu's unicorn AI startup, , apparently just forks LLaMA's architecture and changed a couple of tensor names
thanks to open source, it was pointed out in a HF thread for all to see:
that's the state of AI in China, folks
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As a passport carrying 🇨🇦, I'm embarrassed we need a US plane to shoot it down
As a passport carrying 🇺🇸, I'm embarrassed we need to shoot everything down
As a person of 🇨🇳 heritage, I'm embarrassed we can't navigate a balloon
As a citizen of the 🌎, I'm just embarrassed
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If passed, the RESTRICT Act basically spells "game over" for all China tech companies in the US
Not just: social media, ecommerce, networking equipment, drones
But also: SaaS, cloud services, infra, even open source software
Section 5 (see screenshot 1) spells out all areas…
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Conflict and drama between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse 🧵
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Gary Locke was my boss at the Commerce Department. He is inspiring, honorable, and the epitome of the American dream.
He grew up in a housing project, became Governor/Secretary/Ambassador. His father fought in WWII.
Locke is the BEST of America. Trump is the WORST.
Goddamn this shit is infuriating. Gary Locke is as American as the day is long. Trump rewriting history as if he effectively responded to the virus is utter garbage. We lost 70 days and thousands of lives due to his incompetence and disregard for what was happening overseas.
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To those of you who still think “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” are just benign jokes, my community is hurting, (literally) bleeding, and crying for help.
Are you listening?
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This is the reason, in Morris Chang’s mind, why US semiconductor manufacturing won’t succeed to the level of Taiwan
It’s raw work ethics
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16/ "Anyway I came here specifically to see the end of the beginning and to wish TSMC the best, in the full expectation that we are going to have success. And it will be a very meaningful success as Mark has just said.
And my dream lives. Thank you very much." /END
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At this very moment, 3 of the top 5 apps on Apple US are made by Chinese tech
We are either in a national security crisis, or this is all a big nothing burger, or DC policy elites have so little credibility among ordinary Americans it doesn’t even matter if they are right
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Kumamoto supermarkets are now full of Taiwanese foods and products. Local international school expanded facility and hired Taiwanese teachers to cater to kids of TSMC engineers
All to support TSMC's success in Japan
Until Phoenix does the same and more, we have no chance
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Night before his NTU commencement speech, Jensen hit up the Taipei night market, just like another normal person.
What a guy. What a GOAT.
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Here is our translation of Zhang Yiming's last speech, possibly ever.
It was delivered in March at ByteDance's annual all-hands, 2 months before resigning as CEO.
One of the most philosophical, meditative, and self-aware tech CEO speeches I've ever read.
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BREAKING: China Association of Automobile Manufacturers announces that Tesla has passed China’s data security test and cleared its data security risks
Announcement comes shortly after Musk met with Premier Li
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11/ "The twenty-some years in the past have witnessed a big change in the world. A big geopolitical situation.
Globalization is almost dead. Free trade is almost dead. And a lot of people still wish they would come back, but I really don’t think they will be back for a while."
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1/ TSMC's earnings call last week revealed more details on how much and why chips will cost *much more* now that "globalization is dead"
Thread🧵of salient parts w/ transcript screenshots from
@KoyfinCharts
+ my own takes in bracket []👇
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Polygon's design choice, trading off Consistency for Availability, is similar to a generation of popular NoSQL distributed databases: MongoDB, Cassandra, Dynamo, Cosmos, etc
No surprise Stripe chose
@0xPolygon
for its crypto payout product. 3/5
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Arizona fab is delayed, so TSMC wants to bring 500 workers from Taiwan to speed things up
These workers will be on EB-2 visas
In response, Arizona Pipe Trades 469 union (for pipefitters) started a petition lobbying AZ lawmakers to deny their visas
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15/ "So before we see a single wafer, we have more than a thousand people being trained. This I think is a very good sign that we are prepared. It’s a very good sign that my dream of 25 years ago will now be fulfilled by Mark."
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Like I said, this conflict between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse
How this conflict gets resolve may make or break US industrial policy
Conflict and drama between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse 🧵
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Before you read this White House statement, consider these facts first
In 2023, the Big Three sold this many cars in China:
GM: 2,099,000
Ford: 467,000 (Ford includes Taiwan here)
Stellantis: ~100,000 (groups China, India, elsewhere in APAC together, so I only took 50%)
And…
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2/ "When I started TSMC back in 1987, I had a dream. Probably because of my background, which up to that point, was primarily America. Probably because of my background, my dream was to build fabs in the United States."
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Meanwhile, a Taiwanese news YouTube channel with ~3 million subs made a video saying:
- American workers are lazy
- They use their phones at work (with a grainy photo), a big no-no at TSMC fabs
- Workers join TSMC as a springboard to work at Intel
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More on the RESTRICT Act:
Section 11: there's civil penalty for up to $250,000 for violating the Act -- presumably if someone uses a VPN to access a banned TikTok, that would be a violation
The US may, indeed, be out China-ing China
If passed, the RESTRICT Act basically spells "game over" for all China tech companies in the US
Not just: social media, ecommerce, networking equipment, drones
But also: SaaS, cloud services, infra, even open source software
Section 5 (see screenshot 1) spells out all areas…
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Zhang Xiaojun, one of my favorite independent tech journalists in China, wrote a long piece on the state of VC investing in Chinese AI startups.
Some interesting takeaways:
- Vast majority of the $$ are concentrated in ~10 startups led by either already successful and wealthy…
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.
@JiayangFan
is an accomplished, professional writer. I'm neither of those things. But we both learned English as a 2nd language & I'd love to do an open thread about all the insecurities/self-doubts/etc re writing in Eng.
Are ppl interested in this thread?
Are you up for it JY?
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14/ "And we hired almost 600 engineers here a year and a half ago, we sent them to Taiwan, and they were under training in Taiwan for one year to a year and a half.
In the meantime, about the same number of Taiwan engineers underwent training in Taiwan also."
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Morris Chang and Joe Tsai did an event together at the Asia Society
The one newsworthy item was Chang sharing over lunch (later revealed by moderator during event) that TSMC Arizona will reach TSMC Taiwan's capabilities in 1-2 years
Sounds like TSMC AZ may be doing better
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5/ "However, we ran into cost problems. We ran into people problems. We ran into cultural problems. And before long, the dream fulfilled became a nightmare fulfilled." [nervous laughter from the crowd]
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10/ "The romance of the beginning is gone! The initial excitement is gone! A lot of hard work remains, a lot of hard work…"
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3/ "So, eight years from our start up, we started in 1987, and in 1995, we broke ground in a town called Camas, which is in the state of Washington, just on the border of Oregon, In fact, it's very close to Portland, Oregon."
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A great human story from
@restofworld
@violazhouyi
of TSMC's Arizona struggles
For people who are bicultural and worked in between US/East Asia, the observations are familiar anecdotes
For people who haven't, it is a jarring but real account
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9/ "It is a Taiwan custom. I did not understand what the name meant at first, but now, I’ve heard it so many times, I’ve been at 'first tool-in' ceremonies so many times, I now understand what it means.
Basically it means, the end of the beginning...for a factory"
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My new
@interconnect_ed
post profiles Polygon
@0xPolygon
's origin story, core technology & potential as an investment
To me, Polygon is web3's MongoDB, and more
Summary 🧵👇 1/5
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A separate website was made, targeting AZ lawmakers to "Stand With American Workers, Hold TSMC Accountable"
Narrative is on TSMC insulting American workers by bringing in cheap foreign labor, not creating jobs
Site is funded by Arizona Pipe Trades 469
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Had a long 💛to💛 w/ mom.
She told me when she came to 🇺🇸 in 1992 by herself, she brought a grand total of $1600.
Once she only spent 50 bucks a month & was ecstatic -- confident she could keep going and bring me to 🇺🇸 one day.
Things immigrant parents do for their kids.
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The man who DELIBERATELY crosses off the "corona"virus to call it the "Chinese" virus will NEVER speak for the Chinese AMERICAN community.
Asian Americans are VERY angry at what China has done to our Country, and the World. Chinese Americans are the most angry of all. I don’t blame them!
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12/ "In the meantime, because of the change in political situation, the new dream, well…it’s the old dream revived, has the help of the US government, the federal government, the state government, the local government."
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A good day to share this rarely scene photo by
@PeteSouza
of Gary Locke, Steven Chu, & Eric Shinseki. Pretty sure
@BarackObama
never asked them where are they REALLY from before nominating them to be the Commerce, Energy & Veteran Affairs Secretary respectively. cc
@ChrisLu44
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There are many legit differences between Mainland and Taiwanese cultures, broadly speaking
Though in the narrow confines of huge tech companies, e.g. TSMC, ByteDance, Alibaba, etc. the cultures could not be more similar
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6/ "It took up several years to untangle ourselves from the nightmare. And I decided that I needed to postpone the dream, just postpone, just postpone it…"
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8/ "Incidentally, this ceremony was called the first 'tool-in'. Nobody outside Taiwan understood what that meant, so now it’s called 'opening ceremony'."
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To my fellow Chinese Americans:
Stay strong!
We've been bombarded with
#coronavirus
news on WeChat long before Twitter noticed. We've been worried for our parents, relatives, friends in China for weeks, sending them information, love, masks.
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4/ "We called it Wafertech. It was a well-conceived semiconductor factory. Its technology was completely up to date at that time. It was, I thought, a dream fulfilled."
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"My dream has been to become an R&D engineer at TSMC"
Until enough people say that in America -- for TSMC or Intel or Samsung or any chip maker -- CHIPS Act is nothing but a band-aid (and, so far, an ineffectual one)
We’ve been trying to get access inside Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for 2 YEARS. TSMC is the world leader in advanced chips & in the midst of a global expansion. But can their business model work outside of Taiwan?
@EricCheungwc
@JohnnyMees
& I went to find out.
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7/ "25 years passed and we have a new chairman, Mark Liu. And he happens to share my dream! Now you see a partial, not yet fulfilled, but progress of this dream."
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Wang Chuanfu, the founder of BYD, was born into a peasant family with 7 other siblings.
His father, a carpenter, died when Wang was 13. Mother died when he was in junior high.
His home town, Wuwei (无为), can literally be translated to “no achievement”.
Whether you like BYD or…
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This post from the same IBEW 640 FB group showed screenshots of dismissive, insulting and racist comments from a (supposedly) popular Taiwanese online forum about US workers
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An interesting think tank report, sadly diminished by a misleading headline
Half of this 3.4B to BYD came in the form of purchase subsidies, i.e. incentives for consumers to buy EVs. The fact that BYD got the most just means people wanted BYD EVs the most.
Tesla was 2nd.
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13/ "Not only that, we did learn from our experience earlier, and we are far more prepared now."
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Out of the ~$53 billion incentives, only last week did some $238 million get distributed
That's less than 1%
And they are funding R&D hubs, aka "labs", not the fabs we desperately need to make more chips ()
What's happening to the fabs subsidies?
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Also, can't help but see this picture as a giant middle finger from the desert cactus to the looming fabs 😂🙃
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Local IBEW 640's Facebook group is lit up with posts about TSMC claiming US workers lacking skills as a disguise to bring cheaper labor from Taiwan
(IBEW = International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers)
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More analysis 👇
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All these attempts to restrict open source, first in AI, then in chip design (i.e. RISC-V), are: ill-advised, short-sighted, bad for innovation, and impossible to enforce.
Or in one word: dumb!
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Skipped dinner yesterday b/c felt compelled to produce an English version of Jack Ma's Bund Summit speech.
Don't normally do translation, but most coverage of speech + Ant IPO cancellation has been lacking & simplistic. Worth reading in its entirety👇
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2/ "We're not able to share with you a specific cost gap number between Taiwan and US, but we can share with you that the major reason for the cost gap is the construction cost of building and facilities, which can be 4 to 5x greater for US fab versus a fab in Taiwan."
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Before you take for granted that China is restricting US autos domestically, it's not true
It is true for social media and Internet companies, not true for autos
As a former Obama White House staffer, I respect and am fond of many who work in the Biden admin
But this post-fact…
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Profile update.
Excited to work with
@ericabrescia
and Hubbers everywhere to bring GitHub to more developers all around the 🌏.
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This is massive validation for
@0xPolygon
, the incredible team built by
@jdkanani
@sandeepnailwal
@anuragarjun
@MihailoBjelic
, and the potential of the web3 ecosystem in India.
3/ USDC provides an open platform for connecting people with value, with Twitter users able to bring a digital wallet and receive payments. By building on USDC for Polygon, it allows for large-scale transactions at pennies cost. Yes, crypto payments can reach internet scale!
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@JosephJacks_
small nit: he said around 600,000 H100 equivalents of compute including other type of GPUs
but larger point stands. this is a BFD 😉
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0/ NEW POST: "What Does Agora $API Do?"
With Clubhouse becoming the hottest social app in SV since probably Snapchat, and it being built on Agora, more ppl may want to know what $API actually does.
It more than deserves its own deep dive.
Thread👇
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Porsche is going in all-in on open source
Its principle: "Move from commercial-software to free-open-source-software, wherever possible"
Notable projects:
- a Terraform AWS ECR usage dashboard
- a UI design system localized for customers in China
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Why TSMC loves Japan, some numbers👇
1st fab time to completion: 20 months (usually 3 years)
Gov't subsidies: ~$8.02B USD ($3.16B for 1st fab, $4.86B for 2nd)
New grad salary offer: ~$22,700 USD (as comp, Taiwan: ~$23,500 USD, US: ~$60,000 USD)
It's a no-brainer
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Who knew always sounding convincing but wrong can be such a great business model
Life of a professional opinion-haver I suppose
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I'm hosting a virtual Zoom Town Hall for any one feeling triggered or scared by COVID19 related racism.
Saturday Mar21 11AM PST/2PM EST. Fill out this form w/ email; I'll send you the link 15 min before starting
Pls RT & fwd form to non Twitter users💪🙏
To my fellow Chinese Americans:
Stay strong!
We've been bombarded with
#coronavirus
news on WeChat long before Twitter noticed. We've been worried for our parents, relatives, friends in China for weeks, sending them information, love, masks.
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Some additional thoughts that further shows this NYT pod is sadly a hit piece on Tesla with a tropey China backdrop -- uninformative and misleading
1. if Tesla was the industrial "catfish" China lured to boost itself, well, it almost killed BYD. When Tesla set up Shanghai…
This “Tesla” podcast is interesting in its positioning. Claims “Tesla” hurt itself by going to China. Two HUGE items left out. First, if BYD is a challenge for Tesla it’s a MASSIVE challenge for Ford/GM. This is never discussed. 2nd, Elon always said he wanted Tesla to kick…
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Challenge 3: AI generated content hard to control
Hard to guarantee all content are "high quality" and adhere to "facts"
(GenAI is by nature probabilistic, not deterministic. A government that needs absolutely control will find it more threatening than desirable)
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“, the company behind ChatGPT…”??
Good lord CNBC your stupidity continues to exceed market expectations
$AI
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This is an important observation that deserves more emphasis
Much of US-China tech competition narrative focuses on semis and genAI. Consensus view: China is behind but trying hard to catch up. On AI, Joe Tsai says 2 years, I've said 2-4 years, others said at least 1 year --…
And the harsh reality is that America/RoW is farther behind China on this front than China is behind the bleeding-edge on semi capex.
And while China is making progress catching up on the latter, America is making painfully slow progress on the former.
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Alright, let's talk about this Agora $API China thing, esp in light of the
@stanfordio
report.
Thread 👇0/7
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Challenge 2: homegrown training and inference compute is long way off
Multiple domestic chip vendors each with own ecosystem, making high performance deployment difficult
Training 100B+ parameter models very shaky
(US export control on chips has worked very well)
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Honeymoon vibes in St. Lucia -- one of the few sovereigns that first established dip relations with Taiwan, then switched to the PRC, then switched back to Taiwan
We, of course, picked it for the overwater bungalow 🌴
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@erhartford
Totally agree on the training point; no complaint from me re llama architecture
What irks people, many in China (one of the most vocal complaints came from ex-AI lead at Alibaba Cloud) is raising $$ off of its supposed innovative OSS models
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Answer: not much
$200m were marked for "development of the domestic semiconductor workforce" but doing nothing
(Screenshot of legislative fine print)
Meanwhile, TSMC Arizona is behind due to lack of skilled workers, while mired in drama w/ local unions:
Conflict and drama between TSMC and local Arizona unions are bad and getting worse 🧵
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With all the huff and puff about the importance of onshoring chips making for sake of our national security, CHIPS Act execution shows no competency and no urgency
I've worked in that Commerce building before (Secretary's office). It's a cavernous, dreary place
No number of…
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Challenge 1: no self sufficiency in model architecture
GPT-series is proprietary, and most Chinese models are built by leveraging open source LLaMA
(This over-reliance on LLaMA is seen as a severe problem, not some shortcut to leapfrog the US)
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Yesterday, I sent a mass email to a list I keep of friends & mentors I've met over the years, just to say I appreciate them
Responses were overwhelming, many from people I haven't heard from in years
I hope you try it
All crisis pass. Until then let's keep each other afloat
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1) I spent Saturday reading some fine prints of the CHIPS Act, because...why not? Just being a responsible citizen and taxpayer.
Here's what I learned (with screenshots) 👇🧵
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Most of you are prob here for tech/China/open source stuff.
Ppl who've known me longer know I've been cohosting
@ModelMajorityP
for 4 yrs (195 eps) to lift Asian American voices--intved many women leaders.
It's a good day to get to know these women's stories. Here's the list👇
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Growing up an immigrant and raised by a single mom, Christmas was just a much-needed extra day off.
No ritual. No present. No tradition.
All that changed this year, and I cannot be more grateful for the experience.
#MerryChristmas
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“If the American tech industry requires one-third less capacity [due to the loss of the Chinese market], no one is going to need American fabs, we will be swimming in fabs” -- Jensen Huang
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Answer: not much
$19B of the $39B allocated to subsidize building fabs are supposed to be distributed within FY22
(Screenshot of legislative fine print)
FY22 ends in 6 days (on Sept 30)!
What about $$$ earmarked to train domestic workers?
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7/ tldr:
- US fabs cost 4-5x more
- New sources of cost incl labor, red tape, training
- TSMC chips price will increase dramatically
- Entire supply chain ecosystem needs to be re-created, not just fabs
This is the reality when globalization is dead /END
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These challenges are fundamental, not temporary and solvable in 1-2 years by piling on subsidies or engineering
May get solved eventually, but "eventually" takes a while
China's AI ascendancy or threat vs US is likely overblown, but hey, if it blowing it up is good for…
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"companies are forced to recruit heavily from every population except white and Asian men already trained in the field. It’s like fishing in all the places you aren’t getting bites."
Really astonishing information on how The CHIPS Act is failing to deliver the promised domestic semiconductor production growth because the DEI requirements in the bill make it too difficult for companies to make it work.
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#DearJohnKelly
By “modern” do you mean “white”?
By “put into foster or whatever” do you mean “I don’t give a shit”?
By “out of limbo...into heaven” are you saying DACAs are dead?
Please clarify. Your English is really bad. You should learn more skills and assimilate better.
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@stevcapital
Lots. And many more aspiring to enter the US market for legit market expansion needs.
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Seen on Chinese Internet rn
Characters = Baidu Ernie’s Chinese name
😂🤦🏻
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