Linked List: August 11, 2025

Monday, 11 August 2025

‘The Quid Pro Quo Arrangement Is Unprecedented’ ★

Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton, reporting for the Financial Times:

Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the US government 15 per cent of the revenues from chip sales in China, as part of an unusual arrangement with the Trump administration to obtain export licences for the semiconductors. [...]

The quid pro quo arrangement is unprecedented. According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.

But the deal fits a pattern in the Trump administration where the president urges companies to take measures, such as domestic investments, for example, to prevent the imposition of tariffs in an effort to bring in jobs and revenue to America.

This FT report starts out on shaky ground, using the same “unusual agreement” euphemism as the WSJ and NYT reports, but they soon found a little backbone with “The quid pro quo arrangement is unprecedented.”

This is not merely unusual. It is unprecedented. Seemingly, too, plainly unconstitutional.

Quipped a friend: “Nvidia and AMD’s general counsels must be wondering how much of this money they can eventually get back, if we ever reverse the banana republic index.”

‘Unusual Agreements’ ★

Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that deepen their relationships with the U.S. government.

The Trump administration will receive 15% of the sales as part of a deal to approve exports of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip to China, according to people familiar with the matter. That could amount to billions of dollars given demand for the H20 chips and is the latest example of the White House employing novel tactics to raise revenue. The administration has reached the same agreement with AMD for its MI308 chip, the people said. Details of the arrangements and the financial structures are still being worked out.

Tripp Mickle, reporting on the same story for The New York Times (also a gift link):

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15 percent of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a highly unusual financial agreement with the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said. [...]

There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Mr. Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies. In June, the administration approved investment by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, in U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the company, a rarely used practice where the government takes a stake in a business.

Unusual agreements is quite the euphemism for a shakedown. US companies pay the Treasury a share of their revenue all the time, of course. That’s called taxation. But taxes are laws, written by Congress. There’s no tax here. Congress has played zero role whatsoever in these deals.

CNN, today:

President Donald Trump defended a deal he struck with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to allow the sale of certain semiconductor chips to China in exchange for the company giving the U.S. government 15 percent of the revenue.

“I said, ‘I want 20 percent if I’m going to approve this for you,’” Trump told reporters Monday during a White House press conference. “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself. … And he said, ‘Would you make it 15?‘ So we negotiate a little deal.”

The tell here, revealing just how fucked up this whole thing is getting, is that Trump felt the need to say “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself.”

Mad King Watch, Intel Edition ★

The president of the United States, on his blog three days ago:

The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!

The president of the United States, on his blog today:

I met with Mr. Lip-Bu Tan, of Intel, along with Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent. The meeting was a very interesting one. His success and rise is an amazing story. Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Sane, steady, predictable leadership.

Trump Extends China Tariff Deadline by 90 Days, Again ★

CNBC:

President Donald Trump on Monday delayed high U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods from snapping back into place for another 90 days, a White House official told CNBC. [...]

Monday’s extension is the latest example of how Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs have shifted with little prior notice, a dynamic that has made U.S. trade policy unpredictable for many businesses.

TACO Tuesday, but on a Monday. What a country! America really is great again.

Bonus question for the CNBC copy desk: how much water is the word many carrying in that closing sentence?

AOL Pulls the Plug on Dial-Up Service ★

Mark Tyson at Tom’s Hardware:

AOL, now a Yahoo property, will end its dial-up internet service, the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN)-based internet connectivity service, on September 30, 2025. Its dial-up service has been publicly available for 34 years, and has provided many an internet surfer’s first taste of the WWW. AOL will also end its AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser. RIP slowband.

Thomas Ricker at The Verge:

You might be surprised that the service was still operating. I’m not. At last count, a 2019 US census estimated that 265,000 people in the United States were still using dial-up internet.

Unsurprisingly, I never used AOL, but, I of course did use dial-up service to access the Internet. First for a few years while still a student at Drexel, then through some sort of commercial service here in Philadelphia. I forget the name of the company. But I do remember using IPNetRouter, a terrific classic Mac utility by Peter Sichel/Sustainable Softworks that allowed you to share a dial-up connection with your LAN. (Amazingly, the Sustainable Softworks website is still up, seemingly unchanged for decades.)

So when my now-wife and I moved in together in 1999, I set up a LAN connecting our Macs and my HP LaserJet. My Mac was connected to a modem, which used a second phone line that was just for Internet access. When either of our Macs tried to access the Internet, IPNetRouter, running all the time on my PowerMac 9600/350, would initiate a dial-up connection that both of us could use at the same time. It felt like a pretty nifty setup.

I don’t recall when we first got a broadband connection — DSL for a few years, then cable — but I’m thinking it might have been as early as 2000 or 2001. It certainly wasn’t too long after that. So I think I only ever used dial-up modems for six or seven years. Maybe eight years, tops. But in hindsight those years feel like an entire era of my life. Those connections were just breathtakingly slow. But slow, finicky Internet service in your home was infinitely more amazing and fun and useful than what we were all used to — which was not having any sort of online connectivity at all. We all knew what it was like to have “real” Internet speeds in buildings on our college campuses or, for some of us, in offices where we went to work. So we knew that even the fastest dial-up connection was painfully slow. But we made do. Software was designed to treat bandwidth — each and every request — as a precious, limited resource. It was a deliberate choice, by you, the user, to “go online” to, say, check and send email. Developers took pains to make their apps as small as possible, because downloading even a few megabytes could take a while. Websites eschewed bloat, because if a website was bloated, no one would bother going there. In some ways, overall, things were better because the technology was so much worse. My nostalgia for that era is quite profound — exemplified, of course, by my Pavlovian affection for the distinctive grating sound of a modem initiating its connection.