Author name: Shannon Garcia

Penguin poop may help preserve Antarctic climate

Antarctica, Arctic, Penguins, poop, poop talk, Science, syndication / Shannon Garcia / May 24, 2025

Ammonia aerosols from penguin guano likely play a part in the formation of heat-shielding clouds.

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

New research shows that penguin guano in Antarctica is an important source of ammonia aerosol particles that help drive the formation and persistence of low clouds, which cool the climate by reflecting some incoming sunlight back to space.

The findings reinforce the growing awareness that Earth’s intricate web of life plays a significant role in shaping the planetary climate. Even at the small levels measured, the ammonia particles from the guano interact with sulfur-based aerosols from ocean algae to start a chemical chain reaction that forms billions of tiny particles that serve as nuclei for water vapor droplets.

The low marine clouds that often cover big tracts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica are a wild card in the climate system because scientists don’t fully understand how they will react to human-caused heating of the atmosphere and oceans. One recent study suggested that the big increase in the annual global temperature during 2023 and 2024 that has continued into this year was caused in part by a reduction of that cloud cover.

“I’m constantly surprised at the depth of how one small change affects everything else,” said Matthew Boyer, a coauthor of the new study and an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research. “This really does show that there is a deep connection between ecosystem processes and the climate. And really, it’s the synergy between what’s coming from the oceans, from the sulfur-producing species, and then the ammonia coming from the penguins.”

Climate survivors

Aquatic penguins evolved from flying birds about 60 million years ago, shortly after the age of dinosaurs, and have persisted through multiple, slow, natural cycles of ice ages and warmer interglacial eras, surviving climate extremes by migrating to and from pockets of suitable habitat, called climate refugia, said Rose Foster-Dyer, a marine and polar ecologist with the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

A 2018 study that analyzed the remains of an ancient “super colony” of the birds suggests there may have been a “penguin optimum” climate window between about 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, at least for some species in some parts of Antarctica, she said. Various penguin species have adapted to different habitat niches and this will face different impacts caused by human-caused warming, she said.

Foster-Dyer has recently done penguin research around the Ross Sea, and said that climate change could open more areas for land-breeding Adélie penguins, which don’t breed on ice like some other species.

“There’s evidence that this whole area used to have many more colonies … which could possibly be repopulated in the future,” she said. She is also more optimistic than some scientists about the future for emperor penguins, the largest species of the group, she added.

“They breed on fast ice, and there’s a lot of publications coming out about how the populations might be declining and their habitat is hugely threatened,” she said. “But they’ve lived through so many different cycles of the climate, so I think they’re more adaptable than people currently give them credit for.”

In total, about 20 million breeding pairs of penguins nest in vast colonies all around the frozen continent. Some of the largest colonies, with up to 1 million breeding pairs, can cover several square miles.There aren’t any solid estimates for the total amount of guano produced by the flightless birds annually, but some studies have found that individual colonies can produce several hundred tons. Several new penguin colonies were discovered recently when their droppings were spotted in detailed satellite images.

A few penguin colonies have grown recently while others appear to be shrinking, but in general, their habitat is considered threatened by warming and changing ice conditions, which affects their food supplies. The speed of human-caused warming, for which there is no precedent in paleoclimate records, may exacerbate the threat to penguins, which evolve slowly compared to many other species, Foster-Dyer said.

“Everything’s changing at such a fast rate, it’s really hard to say much about anything,” she said.

Recent research has shown how other types of marine life are also important to the global climate system. Nutrients from bird droppings help fertilize blooms of oxygen-producing plankton, and huge swarms of fish that live in the middle layers of the ocean cycle carbon vertically through the water, ultimately depositing it in a generally stable sediment layer on the seafloor.

Tricky measurements

Boyer said the new research started as a follow-up project to other studies of atmospheric chemistry in the same area, near the Argentine Marambio Base on an island along the Antarctic Peninsula. Observations by other teams suggested it could be worth specifically trying to look at ammonia, he said.

Boyer and the other scientists set up specialized equipment to measure the concentration of ammonia in the air from January to March 2023. They found that, when the wind blew from the direction of a colony of about 60,000 Adélie penguins about 5 miles away, the ammonia concentration increased to as high as 13.5 parts per billion—more than 1,000 times higher than the background reading. Even after the penguins migrated from the area toward the end of February, the ammonia concentration was still more than 100 times as high as the background level.

“We have one instrument that we use in the study to give us the chemistry of gases as they’re actually clustering together,” he said.

“In general, ammonia in the atmosphere is not well-measured because it’s really difficult to measure, especially if you want to measure at a very high sensitivity, if you have low concentrations like in Antarctica,” he said.

Penguin-scented winds

The goal was to determine where the ammonia is coming from, including testing a previous hypothesis that the ocean surface could be the source, he said.

But the size of the penguin colonies made them the most likely source.

“It’s well known that sea birds give off ammonia. You can smell them. The birds stink,” he said. “But we didn’t know how much there was. So what we did with this study was to quantify ammonia and to quantify its impact on the cloud formation process.”

The scientists had to wait until the wind blew from the penguin colony toward the research station.

“If we’re lucky, the wind blows from that direction and not from the direction of the power generator,” he said. “And we were lucky enough that we had one specific event where the winds from the penguin colony persisted long enough that we were actually able to track the growth of the particles. You could be there for a year, and it might not happen.”

The ammonia from the guano does not form the particles but supercharges the process that does, Boyer said.

“It’s really the dimethyl sulfide from phytoplankton that gives off the sulfur,” he said. “The ammonia enhances the formation rate of particles. Without ammonia, sulfuric acid can form new particles, but with ammonia, it’s 1,000 times faster, and sometimes even more, so we’re talking up to four orders of magnitude faster because of the guano.”

This is important in Antarctica specifically because there are not many other sources of particles, such as pollution or emissions from trees, he added.

“So the strength of the source matters in terms of its climate effect over time,” he said. “And if the source changes, it’s going to change the climate effect.”

It will take more research to determine if penguin guano has a net cooling effect on the climate. But in general, he said, if the particles transport out to sea and contribute to cloud formation, they will have a cooling effect.

“What’s also interesting,” he said, “is if the clouds are over ice surfaces, it could actually lead to warming because the clouds are less reflective than the ice beneath.” In that case, the clouds could actually reduce the amount of heat that brighter ice would otherwise reflect away from the planet. The study did not try to measure that effect, but it could be an important subject for future research, he added.

The guano effect lingers even after the birds leave the breeding areas. A month after they were gone, Boyer said ammonia levels in the air were still 1,000 times higher than the baseline.

“The emission of ammonia is a temperature-dependent process, so it’s likely that once wintertime comes, the ammonia gets frozen in,” he said. “But even before the penguins come back, I would hypothesize that as the temperature warms, the guano starts to emit ammonia again. And the penguins move all around the coast, so it’s possible they’re just fertilizing an entire coast with ammonia.”

Penguin poop may help preserve Antarctic climate Read More »

SteamOS 3.7 brings Valve’s gaming OS to other handhelds and generic AMD PCs

asus rog ally, asus rog ally x, gaming, lenovo legion go, steam deck, steamos, Tech, valve / Shannon Garcia / May 23, 2025

Valve’s instructions will walk you through downloading a SteamOS recovery image and copying it to a USB drive using either the Rufus tool (on Windows) or Balena Etcher (the preferred macOS and Linux utility). After turning Secure Boot off, you should be able to boot from the USB drive and install SteamOS as you would on a regular Steam Deck.

Note that there’s no simple, officially supported way to dual-boot SteamOS and Windows; if you decide to turn your handheld, laptop, or desktop into a new Steam Machine, the only way to make it back into a Windows PC is to re-enable Secure Boot and install a fresh copy from another USB drive.

The SteamOS 3.7 update (officially, version 3.7.8) also includes a bunch of other updates to the underlying software: version 6.11 of the Linux kernel (up from version 6.5 in SteamOS 3.6), “a newer Arch Linux base,” version 6.2.5 of the Plasma interface in desktop mode, new Mesa graphics drivers, and various other tweaks and bug fixes.

A second act for SteamOS

The original version of SteamOS was designed to be widely compatible with all kinds of PC hardware and was available both from major PC manufacturers and as a standalone OS that you could (and which we did) install on custom, self-built PCs. But these computers and that version of SteamOS mostly flopped, at least in part because they only ran a small subset of games that natively supported Linux.

The current version of SteamOS launched with more modest aims as the first-party operating system for a single piece of hardware. But by focusing on the game compatibility problem first and leading the way with category-defining hardware, Valve has actually built a much stronger foundation for the current version of SteamOS than it did for the original.

That doesn’t make SteamOS a drop-in replacement for Windows—without strong support for Intel or Nvidia hardware, it’s not a great candidate for the majority of gaming PCs, or even Intel-powered gaming handhelds like the MSI Claw A1M. And Windows is set up to be a multi-purpose general-use operating system in ways that SteamOS isn’t; Valve still says that, despite the presence of desktop mode, “users should not consider SteamOS as a replacement for their desktop operating system.” But for certain kinds of systems that are primarily used as gaming PCs, SteamOS is a real contender.

SteamOS 3.7 brings Valve’s gaming OS to other handhelds and generic AMD PCs Read More »

Uncertainty loomed as FDA advisors met to discuss this year’s COVID shot

annual shots, COVID-19, fda, health, seasonal shots, vaccines / Shannon Garcia / May 23, 2025

Calling it a “practical question,” he asked, “If we were to change strains, can we assume that age-specific licensure won’t change for any of these [vaccine] products?” Currently, COVID-19 boosters are accessible to those aged 6 months and up.

Weir reiterated that there was no answer. Another FDA official, David Kaslow, chimed in to say only, “Rest assured that we’re engaging with the manufacturers on this topic.”

As a follow-up to that exchange, VRBPAC member and infectious disease expert Eric Rubin of Harvard, shot down the FDA’s plan to use randomized placebo-controlled trials for licensure for healthy children and adults. The plethora of observational data—aka real-world data—on the boosters shows clear efficacy, Rubin pointed out. That suggests that requiring people in a trial to take placebos despite the availability of a clearly effective treatment could be unethical.

It suggests “that a randomized controlled trial (RCT) has no equipoise right now, and that you cannot do one,” Rubin said. “I don’t think the RCT is feasible,” he added.

The selection

While the pushback and the questions lingered, the committee still had to select a strain. For now, omicron still reigns, and variants in the JN.1 lineage are still dominant. That is largely unchanged from last year, when vaccine makers were advised to target their seasonal shots against the JN.1 lineage generally, or KP.2, the leading variant in the JN.1 lineage at the time, specifically.

This year, advisors unanimously voted to stick with vaccines that target the JN.1 lineage, in line with recommendations from the World Health Organization. The question of targeting the JN.1 lineage was the only voting question the FDA tasked them with. But there was open discussion on a more specific recommendation. Given the regulatory uncertainty, advisors were divided on whether to stick with the JN.1 and KP.2 formulations from last year or recommend switching to the latest leading variant in the JN.1 family, LP.8.1.

Shortly after the meeting, the FDA announced that it would essentially leave it up to manufacturers; they could stick with JN.1 or KP.2 but, if feasible, switch to LP.8.1.

“The COVID-19 vaccines for use in the United States beginning in fall 2025 should be monovalent JN.1-lineage-based COVID-19 vaccines (2025–2026 Formula), preferentially using the LP.8.1 strain,” it said.

Uncertainty loomed as FDA advisors met to discuss this year’s COVID shot Read More »

The Pentagon seems to be fed up with ULA’s rocket delays

Air Force, rocket, Space, ula, vulcan / Shannon Garcia / May 23, 2025

Some of the displeasure was apparent in April when the US military announced that it would ask SpaceX to launch a plurality of its missions during the next round of national security launches, reversing the preeminent role that ULA had held for the last two decades.

ULA retired its Delta IV Heavy rocket in April 2024, and the handful of Atlas V rockets that remain are committed to other missions. This has left the Air Force dependent on SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles, as the only provider of launch services to get its most expensive and highest priority satellites into orbit.

ULA must “repair trust”

In his testimony, Purdy said ULA completed certification of the initial variant of its Vulcan rocket for military launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 25, but added that “open work” remains. The military and the company are currently working through “risk reduction plans” to limit the chances of an issue with the first launch of a military payload on Vulcan.

“To address these challenges ULA has increased its engineering resources and management focus to resolve design issues,” Purdy wrote. “Government and Federally Funded Research and Development Center personnel have increased involvement in technical and program management challenges.

Vulcan’s first military mission, USSF-106, currently has a no earlier than launch date of July 2025, Purdy wrote. These outstanding risks will ultimately be assessed during a Flight Readiness Review a week or two prior to this launch.

At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative.

“For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule,” Purdy said.

The Pentagon seems to be fed up with ULA’s rocket delays Read More »

Tesla crushed in Europe as BYD outsells; BEV sales surge 28%

Cars, EV adoption / Shannon Garcia / May 22, 2025

When you look at sales at the brand level, things get a little worse for the American automaker. Volkswagen sold more EVs than anyone else in Europe last month, increasing by 61 percent to 23,514 units. As for Tesla? It fell to 11th place, with just 7,165 sales in total, a 49 percent decrease year on year.

Beating it to 10th place was China’s BYD. Barred from the US market by protectionist laws and now heavy new tariffs, BYD has focused instead on Europe. Its PHEVs have been selling strongly there, unaffected by tariffs aimed at BEVs, but even its BEV sales have now eclipsed Tesla, with 7,231 registrations last month.

“Although the difference between the two brands’ monthly sales totals may be small, the implications are enormous,” said Felipe Munoz, global analyst at JATO Dynamics. “This is a watershed moment for Europe’s car market, particularly when you consider that Tesla has led the European BEV market for years, while BYD only officially began operations beyond Norway and the Netherlands in late 2022.”

Tesla crushed in Europe as BYD outsells; BEV sales surge 28% Read More »

Scientists figure out how the brain forms emotional connections

Biology, emitions, neurobiology, Science / Shannon Garcia / May 22, 2025

Whenever something bad happens to us, brain systems responsible for mediating emotions kick in to prevent it from happening again. When we get stung by a wasp, the association between pain and wasps is encoded in the region of the brain called the amygdala, which connects simple stimuli with basic emotions.

But the brain does more than simple associations; it also encodes lots of other stimuli that are less directly connected with the harmful event—things like the place where we got stung or the wasps’ nest in a nearby tree. These are combined into complex emotional models of potentially threatening circumstances.

Till now, we didn’t know exactly how these models are built. But we’re beginning to understand how it’s done.

Emotional complexity

“Decades of work has revealed how simple forms of emotional learning occurs—how sensory stimuli are paired with aversive events,” says Joshua Johansen, a team director at the Neural Circuitry of Learning and Memory at RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Tokyo. But Johansen says that these decades didn’t bring much progress in treating psychiatric conditions like anxiety and trauma-related disorders. “We thought if we could get a handle of more complex emotional processes and understand their mechanisms, we may be able to provide relief for patients with conditions like that,” Johansen claims.

To make it happen, his team performed experiments designed to trigger complex emotional processes in rats while closely monitoring their brains.

Johansen and Xiaowei Gu, his co-author and colleague at RIKEN, started by dividing the rats into two groups. The first “paired” group of rats was conditioned to associate an image with a sound. The second “unpaired” group watched the same image and listened to the same sound, but not at the same time. This prevented the rats from making an association.

Scientists figure out how the brain forms emotional connections Read More »

Brembo develops brakes with almost no brake dust and less wear

Brakes, brembo, Cars, Euro 7 emissions / Shannon Garcia / May 21, 2025

As electric vehicles reduce car exhaust as a source of particulate emissions, people are increasingly focusing on other vehicular sources of pollution that won’t go away with electrification. Tires are one of them, particularly as we grapple with overweight EVs with tire-shredding torque. And brakes are another—even an EV with regenerative braking will occasionally need to use its friction brakes, after all.

Over in Europe, the people responsible for writing regulations have taken this into consideration with the upcoming Euro 7 standard, which sets new limits on 10- and 2.5-micron particulate emissions on all new vehicles—including EVs—starting next year. And to help OEMs achieve that target, Brembo has developed a new brake and pad set called Greentell that it says cuts brake dust emissions by 90 percent, improving durability in the process.

“We started 10 years ago to investigate a different solution. The main topic that we had in mind was to develop a disk that is greener than the current production of cast iron,” said Fabiano Carminati, VP of disc technical development at Brembo.

The solution had to be feasible for mass-market applications, not just as a specialty product. “For the first time, we apply this technology in a huge volume, not like just a niche, but in a high-volume product,” he told me.

“Greentell is the best compromise from a green point of view and [for] performance because the direct pleasure of the end user is a must for us,” he said. “So the goal is to find a coupling that mix[es] the best driving pleasure with the best green product. Green means low emission and green process. It was a really, really difficult challenge for us. We invested a lot of time; we invested a lot of money.”

Brembo develops brakes with almost no brake dust and less wear Read More »

Toyota debuts all-new RAV4 with hybrid and PHEV powertrains only

Cars, rav4 / Shannon Garcia / May 21, 2025

An all-new version of Toyota’s bestselling RAV4 crossover debuted last night. For generation six, Toyota North America is going all-electrified, with hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrains on offer. And while the RAV4 isn’t quite a software-defined vehicle as we understand the term, it features an all-new software platform tying everything together.

Toyota has grouped the various RAV4 configurations into three groups: core, rugged, and sport. And there are three different powertrain options: front-wheel drive hybrid, all-wheel drive hybrid, and all-wheel drive PHEV, although some trims are only available in certain configurations.

Front-wheel drive hybrid RAV4s feature a 226 hp (168 kW) 2.5 L engine, with all-wheel drive hybrid models offering a slight increase at 236 hp (176 kW). The PHEV generates a combined 320 hp (239 kW), and Toyota says it can go 50 miles (80 km) on a single charge.

Better efficiency is thanks in part to the adoption of more efficient silicon carbide inverters, although the battery has also increased in capacity. Certain trims (Woodland, XSE) even offer the ability to DC fast-charge the PHEV, which Toyota says takes 30 minutes to go from 10–80 percent state of charge.

Toyota debuts all-new RAV4 with hybrid and PHEV powertrains only Read More »

Labor dispute erupts over AI-voiced Darth Vader in Fortnite

AI, AI ethics, AI voices, Darth Vader, Disney, epic games, fortnite, gaming, James Earl Jones, machine learning, Policy, star wars, voice actors, voice synthesis / Shannon Garcia / May 20, 2025

For voice actors who previously portrayed Darth Vader in video games, the Fortnite feature starkly illustrates how AI voice synthesis could reshape their profession. While James Earl Jones created the iconic voice for films, at least 54 voice actors have performed as Vader in various media games over the years when Jones wasn’t available—work that could vanish if AI replicas become the industry standard.

The union strikes back

SAG-AFTRA’s labor complaint (which can be read online here) doesn’t focus on the AI feature’s technical problems or on permission from the Jones estate, which explicitly authorized the use of a synthesized version of his voice for the character in Fortnite. The late actor, who died in 2024, had signed over his Darth Vader voice rights before his death.

Instead, the union’s grievance centers on labor rights and collective bargaining. In the NLRB filing, SAG-AFTRA alleges that Llama Productions “failed and refused to bargain in good faith with the union by making unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment, without providing notice to the union or the opportunity to bargain, by utilizing AI-generated voices to replace bargaining unit work on the Interactive Program Fortnite.”

The action comes amid SAG-AFTRA’s ongoing interactive media strike, which began in July 2024 after negotiations with video game producers stalled primarily over AI protections. The strike continues, with more than 100 games signing interim agreements, while others, including those from major publishers like Epic, remain in dispute.

Labor dispute erupts over AI-voiced Darth Vader in Fortnite Read More »

America Makes AI Chip Diffusion Deal with UAE and KSA

America / Shannon Garcia / May 20, 2025

Our government, having withdrawn the new diffusion rules, has now announced an agreement to sell massive numbers of highly advanced AI chips to UAE and Saudi Arabia (KSA). This post analyzes that deal and that decision.

It is possible, given sufficiently strong agreement details (which are not yet public and may not be finalized) and private unvoiced considerations, that this deal contains sufficient safeguards and justifications that, absent ability to fix other American policy failures, this decision is superior to the available alternatives. Perhaps these are good deals, with sufficiently strong security arrangements that will actually stick.

Perhaps UAE and KSA are more important markets and general partners than we realize, and the rest of the world really is unable to deploy capital and electrical power the way they can and there is nothing we can do to change this, and perhaps they have other points of strategic importance, so we have to deal with them. Perhaps they are reliable American allies going forward who wouldn’t use this as leverage, for reasons I do not understand. There are potential worlds where this makes sense.

Diplomacy must often be done in private. We should not judge so quickly.

The fact remains that the case being made for this deal, in public, actively makes the situation seem worse. David Sacks in particular is doubling down and extending the rhetoric I pushed back against last week, when I targeted Obvious Nonsense in AI diffusion discourse. Even within the White House, the China hawks are questioning this deal, and Sacks responded by claiming to not even understand their objections and to all but accuse such people of being traitorous decels wearing trench coats.

I stand by my statements last week that even if accept the premise that all we need care about are ‘America wins the AI race’ and how we must ‘beat China,’ our government’s policies, on diffusion and elsewhere, seem determined to lose an AI race against China.

This is all on top of the entire discussion not only dismissing but outright ignoring the very real possibility that if anyone builds superintelligence, everyone dies. Or that everyone might collectively lose control over the future, with other bad outcomes. Once again, in this post, I will do my best to set these concerns aside.

This ‘have to beat China’ hyperfocus out of Washington has reached new heights of absurdity. I offer an off topic example to drive the point home before we dive into AI.

Imagine an official American report that says we need to push forward to cure cancer because otherwise China might cure cancer before we do, and that would be bad, because they might hoard the drug and use it as leverage. As opposed to, I don’t know, we should cure cancer as quickly as possible so we can cure cancer? No, they do not at any point mention this key advantage to having cured cancer.

I am going to go ahead and say, I want us to beat China, but if China cured cancer then that would be a good thing. And indeed it would reduce, not increase, the urgency of America needing to cure cancer.

If I join the war on cancer, it will not be on the side of cancer.

The point of the diffusion rules is to keep the AI chips secure and out of Chinese hands, both in terms of physical security and use of their compute via remote access. It is possible that the agreements we are making with UAE and KSA will replace and improve upon the functionality, in those countries in particular, of the diffusion rules.

It’s not about a particular set of rules. It is about the effect of those rules. Give me a better way to get the same effect, and I’m happy to take it. When I say ‘something similar’ in #2 and #4 below, I mean in the sense of sufficient safeguards against the diversion of either the physical AI chips or the compute from the AI chips. Access to those chips is what matters most. Whereas market share in selling AI chips is not something I am inclined to worry about except in my role as Nvidia shareholder.

I would also clarify that in #3, I definitely stand by that I do not consider them reliable allies going forward, and there are various reasons that even the best version of these agreements would make me deeply uncomfortable, but it is possible to reach an agreement that physically locates many data centers in the Middle East and lets them reap the financial benefits of their investments and have compute available for local use, but does not in the most meaningful senses ‘hand them’ the compute in question. As in, no I do not trust them, but we could find a way that we do not have to, if they were fully open to whatever it took to make that happen.

If you told me I was wrong about something here, my guess would be that I was wrong about the geopolitical situation, and UAE/KSA are more important strategic partners or more reliable allies than I realize. World geopolitics is not my specialty, and I have uncertainty about these questions, which of course runs in both directions. Discussions in the past week have updated me a small amount in the direction that they are likely more strategically important than I realized.

I also would highlight the implicit claim I made here, that the pool of American advanced AI chips is essentially fixed, and that we have sufficient funding available in Big Tech to buy all of them indefinitely. If that is not true, then the UAE/KSA money matters a lot more. Then there is the similar question of whether we were going to actually run out of available electrical power with no way to get around that. A lot of the question comes down to: What would have counterfactually happened to those chips? Would we have been unable to deploy them?

With that in mind, here are the central points I highlighted last week:

America is ahead of China in AI.

Diffusion rules serve to protect America’s technological lead where it matters.

UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are not reliable American allies, nor are they important markets for our technology. We should not be handing them large shares of the world’s most valuable resource, compute.

The exact diffusion rule is gone but something similar must take its place, to do otherwise would be how America ‘loses the AI race.’

Not having any meaningful regulations at all on AI, or ‘building machines that are smarter and more capable than humans,’ is not a good idea, nor would it mean America would ‘lose the AI race.’

AI is currently virtually unregulated as a distinct entity, so ‘repeal 10 regulations for every one you add’ is to not regulate at all building machines that are soon likely to be smarter and more capable than humans, or anything else either.

‘Winning the AI race’ is about racing to superintelligence. It is not about who gets to build the GPU. The reason to ‘win’ the ‘race’ is not market share in selling big tech solutions. It is especially not about who gets to sell others the AI chips.

If we care about American dominance in global markets, including tech markets, stop talking about how what we need to do is not regulate AI, and start talking about the things that will actually help us, or at least stop doing the things that actively hurt us and could actually make us lose.

Diffusion controls on AI chips we’ve enforced on China so far have had a huge impact. DeepSeek put out a highly impressive AI model, but by their own statements they were severely handicapped by lack of compute. Chinese adoption of AI is also greatly held back by lack of inference compute.

China is competing in spite of this severe disadvantage. It is vital that we hold their feet to the fire on this. China has an acute chip shortage, because it physically cannot make more AI chips, so any chips it would ship to a place like UAE or KSA would each be one less chip available in China.

Dean Ball (White House Strategic Advisor on AI): cue the @ohlennart laser eyes meme.

South China Morning Post: China’s lack of advanced chips hinders broad adoption of AI models: Tencent executive.

Washington’s latest chip export controls could widen the gap in AI adoption between China and the US, Tencent Cloud’s Wang Qui says.

Whenever you see arguments from David Sacks and others against AI diffusion rules, ask the question:

Is an argument for a different set of export controls and a different chip regime that still protects against China getting large quantities of advanced AI chips?
Or is it an argument, as it often is, that to preserve our edge in compute we should sell off our compute, that to preserve our edge in tech we should give away our edge in tech?
1. As in, that what matters is our market share of AI chips, not who uses them?
2. This is not a strawman, for example Ben Thompson argues exactly this very explicitly and repeatedly.
3. Indeed, Ben Thompson’s recent interview with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, made it clear both of them have this exact position. That to maintain America’s edge in AI, we need to sell our AI chips to whoever wants them, including China, because ‘China will not be held back’ as if having a lot more chips wouldn’t have helped them. And essentially saying that all Nvidia chips everywhere support the ‘American tech stack’ rather than China rather obviously turning around and using them for their own tech. He explicitly is yelling we need to ‘compete in China’ or else.
4. Complete Obvious Nonsense talking of his own book, which one must remind oneself is indeed his job, what were you really expecting him to say? Well, what he is saying is that the way we ‘lose the AI race’ is someone builds a CUDA alternative or steals Nvidia market share. That his market is what matters. It’s full text. Not remotely a strawman.

I would disagree with arguments of form #2 in the strongest possible terms. If it’s arguments of form #1, we can talk about it.

We should keep these facts in mind as we analyze the fact that the United States has signed a preliminary chip deal with the UAE. There is a 5GW AUE-US AI campus planned, and is taking similar action in Saudi Arabia. The deals were negotiated by a team led by David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan.

Lennart Heim: To put the new 5GW AI campus in Abu Dhabi (UAE) into perspective. It would support up to 2.5 million NVIDIA B200s.

That’s bigger than all other major AI infrastructure announcements we’ve seen so far.

In exchange for access to our chips, we get what are claimed to be strong protections against chip diversion, and promises of what I understand to be a total of $200 billion in investments by the UAE. That dollar figure is counting things like aluminum, petroleum, airplanes, Qualcomm and so on. It is unclear how much of that is new.

The part of the deal that matters is that a majority of the UAE investment in data centers has to happen here in America.

I notice that I am skeptical that all the huge numbers cited in the various investment ‘deals’ we keep making will end up as actual on-the-ground investments. As in:

Walter Bloomberg: UAE PRESIDENT SAYS UAE TO INVEST $1.4T IN U.S OVER NEXT 10 YEARS

At best there presumably is some creative accounting and political symbolism involved in such statements. Current UAE foreign-direct-investment stock in the USA is only $38 billion, their combined wealth funds only have $1.9 trillion total. We can at best treat $1.4 trillion as an aspiration, an upper bound scenario. If we get the $200 billion we should consider that a win, although if the deal is effectively ‘all your investments broadly are in the West and not in China’ then that would indeed be a substantial amount of funds.

Nor is this an isolated incident. The Administration is constantly harping huge numbers, claiming to have brought in $14 trillion in new investment, including $4 trillion from the recent trip to Arabia, or roughly half of America’s GDP.

Jason Furman (top economic advisor, Obama White House): That’s nuts and baseless. I doubt the press releases even add up to that. But, regardless, press releases are a terrible way to determine the investment or the impact of his policies on it.

Justin Wolfers: Trump has claimed a $1.2 trillion investment deal from Qatar. Qatar’s annual GDP is a bit less than $250 billion per year. So he’s claiming an investment that would require every dollar every Qatari earned over the next five years.

UAE’s MGX will also be opening Europe’s largest data center in France, together with Nvidia, an 8.5 billion Euro investment, first phase to be operational in 2028. This has been in the works for a while.

Not that the numbers ultimately matter all that much. What does matter is: How will we ensure the chips don’t fall literally or functionally into Chinese hands?

It comes down to the security provisions and who is going to effectively have access to and run all this compute. I don’t see here any laying out of the supposed tough security provisions.

Without going into details, if the agreements on both physical and digital security are indeed implemented in a way that is sufficiently tough and robust, if we are the ones who both physically and digitally control and monitor things on a level at least as high as domestically, and can actually have confidence none of this will get diverted, then that goes a long way.

We don’t yet have enough of that information to say.

The public explanations for the deal, and the public statements about what safety precautions are considered necessary, do not bring comfort.

I very much do not like comments like this, made in response to the Bloomberg piece above.

David Sacks (US AI Czar): If the concern [about the deal] is about diversion of advanced semiconductors to China, that’s an important policy objective but one that is easily addressed with a security agreement and a “trust but verify” approach. Modern AI supercomputers are 8 feet tall and weigh two tons; these are not like diamonds smuggled in a briefcase. To verify that chips are where they’re supposed to be, an auditor can just visit the data center and count server racks.

Semianalysis: As such, physical inspections are key to ensuring the GPUs are where they are supposed to be. The White House is aware of the risks and is prepared to ensure the chips are where they are supposed to be. As Bloomberg reported (quotes David Sacks’s statement above).

I’m sorry, what? You can ‘just visit the data center and count server racks’?

It terrifies me to see so many people arguing for the deal explicitly saying that this is a good statement, rather than a terrifying statement that we are hoping no one involved in the actual work believes to be true.

To be clear, I think diversion via remote access is far more likely than physical diversion, and this response does not address the remote access issue at all, but even simply treating this as a physical diversion issue, o3, is the quoted statement accurate?

o3 (full one shot, full response quoted, in response to literally quoting Sacks without attribution and asking ‘is this accurate?’):

Short version: Mostly wrong. Chips are tiny and high-value, so diversion is hard to stop with “count the racks.” Physical audits help but they are far from sufficient.

Why “just count server racks” fails

High value-to-weight ratio.

At ~$30 k per H100, a single 20 kg carry-on full of GPUs is > $1 m. That’s an attractive target. Racks are heavy; the payload isn’t.

Modularity.

GPUs slide out in minutes. An auditor sees the enclosure; they cannot tell if the trays were swapped yesterday or will be tomorrow. Dummy blanks cost <$10.

Front companies & trans-shipping.

Chips often leave the compliant data-center before any inspection window. Paperwork shows them installed; reality changes after the auditor flies home.

Remote lease risk.

Even if the hardware stays in the U.S., Chinese entities can simply rent time on it. Export-control rules treat “deemed exports” (remote access by restricted users) as violations.

Limited audit frequency & competence.

Meaningful verification requires random, intrusive, technically savvy inspections plus cryptographic attestation of firmware. Counting racks is neither.

Bottom-line probability estimate

My best estimate: ≤ 30 % that “security agreement + occasional rack counting” alone keeps advanced GPUs out of China for > 3 years. ≥ 70 % that significant leakage continues absent tighter controls (HW tracking, cryptographic attestation, and supply-chain tagging).

So the quoted claim is misleading: rack-level audits are helpful but nowhere near “easily addresses” the diversion problem.

When I asked how many chips would likely be diverted from a G42 data center if this was the security regime, o3’s 90% confidence interval was 5%-50%. Note that the G42 data center is 20% of the total compute here, so if we generously assume no physical diversion risk in the other 80%, that’s 1%-10% of all compute we deploy in the UAE.

Is that acceptable? The optimal amount of chip diversion is not zero. But I think this level of diversion would be a big deal, and the bigger concern is remote access.

I want to presume, for overdetermined reasons, that Sacks’s statement was written without due consideration or it does not reflect his actual views, and we would not actually make this level of dumb mistake where they could literally just swap the chips out for dummy chips. I presume we are planning to use vastly superior and more effective precautions against chip diversion and also have a plan for robust monitoring of compute use to prevent remote access diversion.

But how can we trust an administration to take such issues seriously, if their AI Czar is not taking this even a little bit seriously? This is not a one time incident. Similar statements keep coming. That’s why I spent a whole post responding to them.

David Sacks is also quoted extensively directly in the Bloomberg piece, and is repeatedly very dismissive of worried about diversion of chips or of compute, saying it is a fake argument and an easy problem to solve, and he talks about these as if they were reliable American allies in ways I do not believe are accurate.

Sacks also continues to appear to view winning AI to be largely about selling AI chips. As in, if G42, an Abu Dhabi-based AI firm, is using American AI chips, then it essentially ‘counts as American’ for purposes of ‘winning,’ or similar. I don’t think that is how this works, or that this is a good use of a million H100s. Bloomberg reports 80% of chips headed to the UAE would go to US companies, 20% to G42.

I very much want us to think about the actual physical consequences of various actions, not what those actions symbolize or look like. I do think, despite everything else, it is a very good sign that David Sacks is ‘urging people to read the fine print.’ This is moderated by the fact that we do not have the fine print, so we can’t read it. The true good news there requires one to read all that fine print, and one also should not assume that the fine print will get implemented. Nor do we yet have access to what the actual fine print says, so we cannot read it.

Dylan Patel and others at Semianalysis offer a robust defense of the deal, saying clearly that ‘America wins’ and that this benefits American AI infrastructure suppliers on all levels, including AI labs and cloud providers.

They focus on three benefits: money, tying KSA/UAE to our tech stack, and electrical power, and warn of the need for proper security, including model weight security, a point I appreciated them highlighting.

Those seem like the right places to focus, and the right questions to ask. How much of their money is really up for grabs and how much does it matter? To what extent does this meaningfully tie UAE/KSA to America and how much does that matter? How much do we need their ability to provide electrical power? How will the security arrangements work, will they be effective, and who will effectively be in charge and have what leverage?

Specifically, on their three central points:

They call this macro, but a better term would be money. UAE and KSA (Saudi Arabia) can make it rain, a ‘trillion-dollar floodgate.’ This raises two questions.
1. Question one: Was American AI ‘funding constrained’? The big tech companies were already putting in a combined hundreds of billions a year. Companies like xAI can easily raise funds to build giant data centers. If Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta or Microsoft wanted to invest more, are they really about to run out of available funding? Are there enough more chips available to be bought to run us out of cash?
2. Semianalysis seems to think we should be worried about willingness of American companies to invest here and thinks we will have trouble with the financing.
3. I am not convinced of this. Have you seen what these companies (don’t have to) pay on corporate bonds? Did we need to bring in outside investors? Should we even want to, given these investments look likely to pay off?
4. This is a major crux. If indeed American big tech companies are funding constrained in their AI investments, then the money matters a lot more. Whereas if we were already capable of buying up all the chips, that very much cuts the other way.
5. Question two: As we discussed earlier, is the trillion-dollar number real? We keep seeing these eye-popping headline investment numbers, but they don’t seem that anchored to reality, and seem to include all forms of investment including not AI, although of course other foreign direct investment is welcome.
6. Do their investments in US datacenters mean anything, and are they even something we want, given that the limiting factor driving all this is either constraints on chip availability or on electrical power? Will this be crowding out other providers?
7. If these deals are so positive for American tech companies, why didn’t the stock market moves reflect this? No, I will not accept ‘priced in.’
They call this geopolitical, that UAE and KSA are now tied to American technology stacks.
1. As they say, ‘if Washington enforces tight security protocols.’ We will see. David Sacks is explicitly dismissing the need for tight security protocols.
2. Classically, as Trump knows well, when the bank loans you a large enough amount and you don’t pay it back, it is the bank that has the problem. Who is being tied to whose stack? They will be able to at least cut the power any time. It is not clear from public info what other security will be present and what happens if they decide to turn on us, or use that threat as leverage. Can they take our chips and their talents elsewhere?
3. This can almost be looked at as a deal with one corporation. G42 seems like it’s going to effectively be on the UAE side of the deal, and it is going to have a lot of chips in a lot of places. A key question is, to what extent do we have the leverage on and control over G42, and to what extent does this mean they will act as a de facto American tech company and ally? How much can we trust that our interests will continue to align? Who will be dependent on who? Will our security protocols extend to their African and European outposts?
4. Why does buying a bunch of our chips tie them into the rest of our stack? My technical understand is that it doesn’t. They’re only tied to the extent that they agreed to be tied as part of the deal (again, details unknown), and they could swap out that part at any time. In my experience you can change which AI your program uses by changing a few lines of code, and people often do.
5. It is not obvious why KSA and UAE using our software or tech stack is important to us other than because they are about to have all these chips. These aren’t exactly huge markets. If the argument is they have oversized effect on lots of other markets, we need to hear this case made out loud.
6. Seminanalysis points out China doesn’t even have the capacity to sell its own AI chips yet. And I am confused about the perspectives here on ‘market share’ and the implied expectations about customer lock-in.
They call this infrastructure, I’d simply call it (electrical) power. This is the clearly valuable thing we are getting. It’s rather crazy that ‘put our most strategic asset except maybe nukes into the UAE and KSA’ was chosen over ‘overrule permitting rules and build some power plants or convince one of our closer allies to do it’ but here we are.
1. So the question here is, what are the alternatives? How acute is the shortage going to be and was there no one else capable of addressing it?
2. Also, even if we do have to make this deal now, this is screaming from the rooftops, we need to build up more electrical power everywhere else now, so we don’t have this constraint again in the future.

Semianalysis also raises the concern about model weight security, but essentially think this is solvable via funding work to develop countermeasures and use of red teaming, plus defense in depth. It’s great to see this concern raised explicitly, as it is another real worry. Yes, we could do work to mitigate it and impose good security protocols, and keep the models from running in places and ways that create this danger, but will we? I don’t know. Failure here would be catastrophic.

There are also other concerns even if we successfully retain physical and digital control over the chips. The more we place AI chips and other strategic AI assets there, the more we are turning UAE, Saudi Arabia and potentially Qatar into major AI players, granting them leverage I believe they can and will use for various purposes.

David Sacks continues to claim to not understand that others think that ‘winning AI’ is mostly not about who gets to sell chips, who uses our models and picks up market share, or about superficially ‘winning’ ‘deals.’

He not only thinks it is about market penetration, he can’t imagine an alternative. He doesn’t understand that many, including myself, this is about who has compute and who gets superintelligence, and about the need for proper security.

David Sacks: I’m genuinely perplexed how any self-proclaimed “China Hawk” can claim that President Trump’s AI deals with UAE and Saudi Arabia aren’t hugely beneficial for the United States. As leading semiconductor analyst Dylan Patel observed, these deals “will noticeably shift the balance of power” in America’s favor. The only question you need to ask is: does China wish it had made these deals? Yes of course it does. But President Trump got there first and beat them to the punch.

Sam Altman: this was an extremely smart thing for you all to do and i’m sorry naive people are giving you grief.

Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson (NYT): One Trump administration official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that with the G42 deal, American policymakers were making a choice that could mean the most powerful A.I. training facility in 2029 would be in the United Arab Emirates, rather than the United States.

But Trump officials worried that if the United States continued to limit the Emirates’ access to American technology, the Persian Gulf nation would try Chinese alternatives.

The hawks are concerned, because the hawks largely do not think that the key question is who will get to sell chips, but rather who gets to buy them and use them. This is especially true given that both America and China are producing as many top AI chips as they can, us far more successfully, and there is more than enough demand for both of them. One must think on the margin.

Given that so many China hawks are indeed on record doubting this deal, if you are perplexed by this I suggest reading their explanations. Here is one example.

Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson (NYT): Mr. Goodrich said the United States still had the best A.I. engineers, companies and chips and should look for ways to speed up permitting and improve its energy grid to hold on to that expertise. Setting up some of the world’s largest data centers in the Middle East risks turning the Gulf States, or even China, into A.I. rivals, he said.

“We’ve seen this movie before and we should not repeat it,” Mr. Goodrich said.

Sam Winter-Levy, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the huge chip sales did “not feel consistent with an America First approach to A.I. policy or industrial policy.”

“Why would we want to offshore the infrastructure that will underpin the key industrial technology of the coming years?” he asked.

This does not seem like a difficult position to understand? There are of course also other reasons to oppose such deals.

Here is Jordan Schneider of China Talk’s response, in which he is having absolutely none of it, explicitly rejecting that either America or China has chips to spare for this. rejecting that UAE and KSA are actual allies, not expecting us to follow through with reasonable security precautions, and saying if we wanted to do this anyway we could have held out for a better deal with more control than this, I don’t know why you would be confused how someone could have this reaction based on the publicly available information:

Jordan Schneider: It’s going to cannibalize US build-out and leave the world with three independent power-centers of AI hardware where we could’ve stuck to our guns, done more power generation at home, and only had China to deal with not these wild-card countries that are not actual allies. If this really is as important as we believe, why are we letting these countries and companies we deeply distrust get access to it?

The Gulf’s BATNA wasn’t Huawei chips, it was no chips. Whatever we’re trying to negotiate for, we can play harder to get. BIS can just say they can’t buy Ascends and it’s not like there’s enough capacity domestically in China to service global demand absent the TSMC loophole they charged through. Plus, we’re offering to sell them 10× the chips that Huawei could conceivably sell them anytime soon even if they use the TSMC-fabbed wafers.

Where’s the art-of-the-deal energy here? Right now I only see AMD and NVDA shareholders as well as Sama benefiting from all of this. I thought we wanted to raise revenue from tariffs? Why not charge 3× the market rate and put the premium into the US Treasury, some “Make America Great Again” industrial-development fund, use it to triple BIS’ budget so they can actually enforce the security side, put them on the hook for Gaza…I don’t know literally anything you care about. How about a commitment not to invest in Chinese tech firms? Do we still care about advanced logic made in America? How about we only let them buy chips fabbed in the US, fixing the demand-side problem and forcing NVDA to teach Intel how to not suck.

Speaking of charging through loopholes, all of the security issues Dylan raises in his article I have, generously, 15 % confidence in USG being able to resolve/resist industry and politicians when they push back. If it’s so simple to just count the servers, why hasn’t BIS already done it / been able to fight upstream industry lobbying to update the chips-and-SME regs to stop Chinese build-outs and chip acquisition? What happens when the Trump gets a call from the King when some bureaucrat is trying to stop shipments because they see diversion if they ever catch it in the first place?

Why are we doing anything with G42 again? Fine, if you really decide you want to sell chips to the UAE, at the very least give American hyperscalers the off-switch. It’s not like they would’ve walked away from that offer! America has a ton to lose in the medium term from creating another cloud provider that can service at scale, saying nothing of one that has some deeply-discomforting China ties pretty obvious even to me sitting here having never gotten classified briefings on the topic.

Do the deal’s details and various private or unvoiced considerations make this deal better than it looks and answer many of these concerns? Could this be sufficient that, if looked at purely through the lens of American strategic interests, this deal was a win versus the salient alternatives? Again: That is all certainly possible!

Our negotiating position could have been worse than Jordan believes. We could have gotten important things for America we aren’t mentioning yet. The administration could have limited room to maneuver including by being divided against itself or against Congress on this. On the flip side, there are some potentially uncharitable explanations for all of this, that would be reasonable to consider.

Instead of understanding and engaging with such concerns and working to allay them, Sacks has repeatedly decided to make this a mask off moment, and engage in a response that I would expect on something like the All-In Podcast or in a Twitter beef, but which is unbecoming of his office and responsibilities, with multiple baseless vibe and ad hominem attacks at once that reflect that he either is willfully ignorant of the views, goals and beliefs of those he is attacking and even who they actually are, or he is lying and does not care, or both, and a failure to take seriously the concerns and objections being raised. Here is another illustration of this:

David Sacks (May 17): After the Sam Bankrun-Fraud fiasco, it was necessary for the Effective Altruists to rebrand. So they are trying to position themselves as “China Hawks.” But their tech deceleration agenda is the same, and it would cost America the AI race with China.

There are multiple other people I often disagree with on important questions but whom I greatly respect who are working on in administration on AI policy. There are good arguments you can make in defense of this deal. Instead of making those arguments in public, we repeatedly get this.

This is what I call Simulacra Level 4. Everything Sacks says seems to be about vibes and implications first and actual factual claims a distant second at best. He doesn’t logically say ‘all so-called China hawks who don’t agree with me are secret effective altruists in trench coats and also decels who hate all technology and all of humanity and also America,’ but you better believe that’s the impression he’s going for here.

Would China have preferred to ‘do this deal’ instead? That at best assumes facts, and arguments, not in evidence. It depends what they would get out of such a deal, and what we’re getting out of ours, and also the security arrangements and whether we’ve formed a long lasting relationship in which we hold the cards.

I’m also not even sure what it would mean for China to have ‘done this deal,’ it does not have what we are offering. Semianalysis says they don’t have similar quantities of chips to sell, and might not have any, nor are their chips of similar quality.

I do agree China would have liked to ‘do a deal’ in some general sense, where they bring UAE/KSA into their orbit, on AI and otherwise, although they don’t need access to electrical power. More capital and friends are always helpful. It’s not clear what that deal would have looked like.

One must again emphasize: There is a lot that we do not know, that matters a lot, or even that has yet to be worked out. Diplomacy often must be done in private. It is entirely possible that there is more information, or there are more arguments and considerations, behind the scenes that justifies what is being done, and that the final deal here is a win and makes sense.

But we can only go on what we know.

Here’s Tyler Cowen being clear eyed about some of what we are selling so cheap. The most powerful AI training facility could be in the UAE, and you’re laughing?

Tyler Cowen: Of course Saudi and the UAE have plenty of energy, including oil, solar, and the ability to put up nuclear quickly. We can all agree that it might be better to put these data centers on US territory, but of course the NIMBYs will not let us build at the required speeds. Not doing these deals could mean ceding superintelligence capabilities to China first. Or letting other parties move in and take advantage of the abilities of the Gulf states to build out energy supplies quickly.

Energy and ability to overcome NIMBYs is only that which is scarce because America is refusing to rise to this challenge and actually enable more power generation. Seriously, is there nowhere in America we can make this happen at scale? If we wanted to, we could do this ourselves easily. We have the natural gas, even if nuclear would be too slow to come online. It is a policy choice not to clear the way. And no, I see zero evidence that we are pulling out the stops here and coming up short.

I think this frame is exactly correct – that this deal makes sense if and only if all of:

The security deal is robust and we retain functional control over where the compute goes.
We trust our friends here to remain our friends at a reasonable price.
We counterfactually would not have been able to buy these chips and build data centers to power these chips.

As far as I can tell China already has all the power it needs to power any AI chips it can produce, it is using them all, and its chip efforts are not funding constrained.

So for want of electrical power, and for a few dollars, we are handing over a large amount of influence over the future to authoritarian powers with very different priorities and values?

Tyler Cowen: In any case, imagine that soon the world’s smartest and wisest philosopher will soon again be in Arabic lands.

We seem to be moving to a world where there will be four major AI powers — adding Saudi and UAE — rather than just two, namely the US and China. But if energy is what is scarce here, perhaps we were headed for additional AI powers anyway, and best for the US to be in on the deal?

Who really will have de facto final rights of control in these deals? Plug pulling abilities? What will the actual balance of power and influence look like? Exactly what role will the US private sector play? Will Saudi and the UAE then have to procure nuclear weapons to guard the highly valuable data centers? Will Saudi and the UAE simply become the most powerful and influential nations in the Middle East and perhaps somewhat beyond?

Yes. Those are indeed many of the right questions, once you think security is solid. Who is in charge of these data centers in the ways that matter? Won’t they at minimum have the ability to cut the power at any time? Who gets to decide where the compute goes? What are they going to do with all this leverage we are handing them?

Is this what it means to have the future be based on American or Democratic values? Do you like ‘the values’ of the UAE and Saudi Arabian authorities?

Tyler Cowen: I don’t have the answers to those questions. If I were president I suppose I would be doing these deals, but it is very difficult to analyze all of the relevant factors. The variance of outcomes is large, and I have very little confidence in anyone’s judgments here, my own included.

Few people are shrieking about this, either positively or negatively, but it could be the series of decisions that settles our final opinion of the second Trump presidency.

The administration thinks that the compute in question will remain under the indefinitely control of American tech companies, to be directed as we wish.

Sriram Krishnan: Reflecting on what has been an amazing week and a key step in global American AI dominance under President Trump.

These Middle East AI partnerships are historic and this “AI diplomacy” will help lock in the American tech stack in the region, help American companies expand there while also building infrastructure back in the U.S to continue expanding our compute capacity.

This happens on top of rigorous security guarantees to stop diversion or unauthorized access of our technology.

More broadly this helps pull the region closer to the U.S and aligns our technological interests in a very key moment for AI.

It’s a very exciting moment and a key milestone.

I hope that they are right about this, but I notice that I share Tyler’s worry that they are wrong.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia’s Humain is going to get ‘several hundred thousand’ of Nvidia’s most advanced processors, starting with 18k GB300 Grace Blackwells.

The justification given for rescinding the Biden diffusion rules is primarily that failure to do this would have ‘weakened diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by downgrading them to second-tier status.’

But, well, not to reiterate everything I said last week, but on that note I have news.

One, we’re weakening diplomatic relations with essentially all countries in a series of unforced errors elsewhere, and we could stop.

Two, most of the listed tier two countries have always had second-tier status. There’s a reason Saudi Arabia isn’t in Five Eyes or NATO. We can talk price about which countries should have which status, but no our relations are not all created equal, not when it comes to strategically vital national interests and to deep trust. I don’t share Sacks’s stated view that these are some of our closest and most trustworthy allies. Why does this administration seem to always want to make its deals mostly with authoritarian regimes, usually in places where Trump has financial ties?

Tripp Mickle and Ana Swanson (NY Times): The announcements of the two deals follow reports that $2 billion has flowed to Trump companies over the last month from the Middle East, including a Saudi-backed investment in Trump’s cryptocurrency and plans for a new presidential airplane from Qatar.

There’s always Trust But Verify. The best solution, if you can’t trust, is often to set up things so that you don’t have to. This can largely be done. Will we do it? And what will we get in return? What is announced mostly seems to be investments and purchases, that what we are getting are dollars, and Bloomberg is skeptical of the stated dollar amounts.

This deal is very much not a first best solution. It is, at best, a move that we are forced into on the margin due to our massive unforced errors in a variety of other realms. Even if it makes sense to do this, it makes even more sense to be addressing and fixing those other critical mistakes.

I discussed this last week, especially under point eight here.

Electrical power is the most glaring in the context of this particular. There needs to be national emergency level focus on America’s inability to build electrical power capacity. Where are the special compute zones? Where are the categorical exemptions? Where is DOGE with regard to the NRC? Where is the push for real reform on any of these fronts? Instead, we see story after story of Congress actively moving to withdraw even the supports that are already there, including plans to outright abrogate contracts on existing projects.

The other very glaring issue is trade policy. If we think it is this vital to maintain trade alliances and open up markets, and maintaining market share, why are we otherwise going in the opposite direction? Why are we alienating most of our allies? And so on.

The argument for this deal is, essentially, that it must be considered in isolation. That other stuff is someone else’s department, and we can only work with what we have. But this is a very bitter pill to be asked to swallow, especially as Sacks himself has spoken out quite loudly in favor of many of those same anti-helpful policies, and the others he seems to be sitting out. You can argue that he needs to maintain his political position, but if that also rules out advocating for electrical power generation and permitting reform, what are we even doing?

If we swallow the entire pill, and consider these deals only on the margin, without any ability to impact any of our other decisions, and only with respect to ‘beating China’ and ability to ‘win the AI race,’ and assume fully good faith and set aside all the poor arguments and consider only the steelman case, we can ask: Do these deals help us?

I believe that such a deal is justifiable, again on the margin and regarding our position with respect to China, if and only if ALL of the following are true:

Security arrangements are robust, the chips actually do remain under our physical control and we actually do determine what happens with the compute. And things are set up such that America retains the leverage, and we can count on UAE/KSA to remain our friends going forward.
This was essentially the best deal we could have gotten.
This represents a major shift in our or China’s ability to stand up advanced AI chips, because for the bulk of these chips either Big Tech would have run out of money, or we would have been unable to source the necessary electrical power, or China has surplus advanced AI chips I was not previously aware of and no way to deploy them.
Entering into these partnerships is more diplomatically impactful, and these friendships are more valuable, than they appear to me based on public info.

Discussion about this post

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Sierra made the games of my childhood. Are they still fun to play?

Features, gaming, Sierra On-Line, space quest II / Shannon Garcia / May 17, 2025

Get ready for some nostalgia.

My Ars colleagues were kicking back at the Orbital HQ water cooler the other day, and—as gracefully aging gamers are wont to do—they began to reminisce about classic Sierra On-Line adventure games. I was a huge fan of these games in my youth, so I settled in for some hot buttered nostalgia.

Would we remember the limited-palette joys of early King’s Quest, Space Quest, or Quest for Glory titles? Would we branch out beyond games with “Quest” in their titles, seeking rarer fare like Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist? What about the gothic stylings of The Colonel’s Bequest or the voodoo-curious Gabriel Knight?

Nope. The talk was of acorns. [Bleeping] acorns, in fact.

The scene in question came from King’s Quest III, where our hero Gwydion must acquire some exceptionally desiccated acorns to advance the plot. It sounds simple enough. As one walkthrough puts it, “Go east one screen and north one screen to the acorn tree. Try picking up acorns until you get some dry ones. Try various spots underneath the tree.” Easy! And clear!

Except it wasn’t either one because the game rather notoriously won’t always give you the acorns, even when you enter the right command. This led many gamers to believe they were in the wrong spot, when in reality, they just had to keep entering the “get acorns” command while moving pixel by pixel around the tree until the game finally supplied them. One of our staffers admitted to having purchased the King’s Quest III hint book solely because of this “puzzle.” (The hint book, which is now online, says that players should “move around” the particular oak tree in question because “you can only find the right kind of acorns in one spot.”)

This wasn’t quite the “fun” I had remembered from these games, but as I cast my mind back, I dimly recalled similar situations. Space Quest II: Vohaul’s Revenge had been my first Sierra title. After my brother and I spent weeks on the game only to die repeatedly in some pitch-dark tunnels, we implored my dad to call Sierra’s 1-900 pay hint line. He thought about it. I could see it pained him because he had never before (and never since!) called a 1-900 number. In this case, the call cost a piratical 75 cents for the first minute and 50 cents for each additional minute. After listening to us whine for several days straight, my dad decided that his sanity was worth the fee, and he called.

Like the acorn example above, we had known what to do—we had just not done it to the game’s rather exacting standards. The key was to use a glowing gem as a light source, which my brother and I had long understood. The problem was the text parser, which demanded that we “put gem in mouth” to use the gem’s light in the tunnels. There was no other place to put the gem, no other way to hold or attach it. (We tried them all.) No other attempt to use the light of this shining crystal, no matter how clear, well-intentioned, or succinctly expressed, would work. You put the gem in your mouth, or you died in the darkness.

Returning from my reveries to the conversation at hand, I caught Ars Senior Editor Lee Hutchinson’s cynical remark that these kinds of puzzles were “the only way to make 2–3 hours of ‘game’ last for months.” This seemed rather shocking, almost offensive. How could one say such a thing about the games that colored my memories of childhood?

So I decided to replay Space Quest II for the first time in 35 years in an attempt to defend my own past.

Big mistake.

Space Quest II screenshot. — We’re not on Endor anymore, Dorothy.

Play it again, Sam

In my memory, the Space Quest series was filled with sharply written humor, clever puzzles, and enchanting art. But when I fired up the original version of the game, I found that only one of these was true. The art, despite its blockiness and limited colors, remained charming.

As for the gameplay, the puzzles were not so much “clever” as “infuriating,” “obvious,” or (more often) “rather obscure.”

Finding the glowing gem discussed above requires you to swim into one small spot of a multi-screen river, with no indication in advance that anything of importance is in that exact location. Trying to “call” a hunter who has captured you does nothing… until you do it a second time. And the less said about trying to throw a puzzle at a Labian Terror Beast, typing out various word permutations while death bears down upon you, the better.

The whole game was also filled with far more no-warning insta-deaths than I had remembered. On the opening screen, for instance, after your janitorial space-broom floats off into the cosmic ether, you can walk your character right off the edge of the orbital space station he is cleaning. The game doesn’t stop you; indeed, it kills you and then mocks you for “an obvious lack of common sense.” It then calls you a “wing nut” with an “inability to sustain life.” Game over.

The game’s third screen, which features nothing more to do than simply walking around, will also kill you in at least two different ways. Walk into the room still wearing your spacesuit and your boss will come over and chew you out. Game over.

If you manage to avoid that fate by changing into your indoor uniform first, it’s comically easy to tap the wrong arrow key and fall off the room’s completely guardrail-free elevator platform. Game over.

Get used to it because the game will kill you in so, so many ways: touching any single pixel of a root monster whose branches form a difficult maze; walking into a giant mushroom; stepping over an invisible pit in the ground; getting shot by a guard who zips in on a hovercraft; drowning in an underwater tunnel; getting swiped at by some kind of giant ape; not putting the glowing gem in your mouth; falling into acid; and many more.

I used the word “insta-death” above, but the game is not even content with this. At one key point late in the game, a giant Aliens-style alien stalks the hallways, and if she finds you, she “kisses” you. But then she leaves! You are safe after all! Of course, if you have seen the films, you will recognize that you are not safe, but the game lets you go on for a bit before the alien’s baby inevitably bursts from your chest, killing you. Game over.

This is why the official hint book suggests that you “save your game a lot, especially when it seems that you’re entering a dangerous area. That way, if you die, you don’t have to retrace your steps much.” Presumably, this was once considered entertaining.

When it comes to the humor, most of it is broad. (When you are told to “say the word,” you have to say “the word.”) Sometimes it is condescending. (“You quickly glance around the room to see if anyone saw you blow it.”) Or it might just be potty jokes. (Plungers, jock straps, toilet paper, alien bathrooms, and fouling one’s trousers all make appearances.)

My total gameplay time: a few hours.

“By Grabthar’s hammer!” I thought. “Lee was right!”

When I admitted this to him, Lee told me that he had actually spent time learning to speedrun the Space Quest games during the pandemic. “According to my notes, a clean run of SQ2 in ‘fast’ mode—assuming good typing skills—takes about 20 minutes straight-up,” he said. Yikes.

And yet

The past was a different time. Computer memory was small, graphics capabilities were low, and computer games had emerged from the “let them live just long enough to encourage spending another quarter” arcade model. Mouse adoption took a while; text parsers made sense even though they created plenty of frustration. So yes—some of these games were a few hours of gameplay stretched out with insta-death, obscure puzzles, and the sheer amount of time it took just to walk across the game’s various screens. (Seriously, “walking around” took a ridiculous amount of the game’s playtime, especially when a puzzle made you backtrack three screens, type some command, and then return.)

Judged by current standards, the Sierra games are no longer what I would play for fun.

All the same, I loved them. They introduced me to the joy of exploring virtual worlds and to the power of evocative artwork. I went into space, into fairy tales, and into the past, and I did so while finding the games’ humor humorous and their plotlines compelling. (“An army of life insurance salesmen?” I thought at the time. “Hilarious and brilliant!”)

If the games can feel a bit arbitrary or vexing today, my child-self’s love of repetition was able to treat them as engaging challenges rather than “unfair” design.

Replaying Space Quest II, encountering the half-remembered jokes and visual designs, brought back these memories. The novelist Thomas Wolfe knew that you can’t go home again, and it was probably inevitable that the game would feel dated to me now. But playing it again did take me back to that time before the Internet, when not even hint lines, insta-death, and EGA graphics could dampen the wonder of the new worlds computers were capable of showing us.

Space Quest II, along with several other Sierra titles, is freely and legally available online at sarien.net—though I found many, many glitches in the implementation. Windows users can buy the entire Space Quest collection through Steam or Good Old Games. There’s even a fan remake that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Sierra made the games of my childhood. Are they still fun to play? Read More »

RFK Jr’s plan to ban fluoride supplements will “hurt rural America,” dentists say

fluoride, health / Shannon Garcia / May 17, 2025

“Harmful”

While fluoride can kill bacteria, particularly at high levels, it’s used in oral health to inhibit the demineralization of tooth enamel while enhancing the remineralization of tooth surfaces, the ADA clarifies.

The best way to get fluoride is through drinking water, the ADA says. But supplements are a safe alternative if a child lives in an area without fluoridated water or if they mostly drink bottled water. Given rampant false and controversial claims about fluoride, more communities are now abandoning it. This week, Florida became the second state after Utah to ban fluoridation state-wide.

“Yes, use fluoride for your teeth, that’s fine,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a news conference after signing the ban into law. “But forcing it in the water supply is basically forced medication on people. They don’t have a choice.”

ADA President Brett Kessler worries what children in places such as Utah and Florida will do to get adequate fluoride if the ban on supplements goes through. “In non-fluoridated communities, especially rural areas, fluoride supplements are the only chance for individuals to get the appropriate amount of fluoride to prevent tooth decay,” Kessler said in the statement. The move will be “particularly harmful to the most vulnerable and those who lack access to care,” he added.

While Makary said that the FDA will conduct a safety review of fluoride supplements, the conclusion seems to be foregone, with the HHS writing that it is already “initiating action to remove” the products.

The ADA noted that places that have removed fluoride from drinking water, such as Calgary, Canada, and Juneau, Alaska, have seen increases in dental decay, particularly among children and low-income populations.

“Proposals like this stand to hurt rural America, not make them healthier,” Kessler said.

RFK Jr’s plan to ban fluoride supplements will “hurt rural America,” dentists say Read More »