This is your Beijing Bytes: US-China Tech War Updates podcast.

You’re plugged back into Beijing Bytes with me, Ting—your navigator through the zeroes and ones of the US-China tech war, where the only thing more volatile than chip prices is the policy ping-pong across the Pacific. Let’s skip the boot screen and dive straight into the latest data flood.

Just this week, US agencies were scrambling thanks to the finest in Chinese hacking innovation. Microsoft and Bloomberg have named names: Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon, and Storm-2603 are all groups tied to Beijing, and they used a nasty zero-day vulnerability in SharePoint to poke holes in American government servers, including a lateral scan of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The Department of Energy says impacts were ‘minimal’—cyber lingo for ‘we dodged the big one’—but the breach underscores how even with all the patching in the world, you’re only as safe as your next undiscovered flaw.

While American agencies were restoring their backups, news broke that the Trump administration reversed the famous AI chip ban, giving Nvidia and AMD the OK to peddle their tailored H20 and MI308 chips to China. In April, these same chips were enemy tech non grata, so industry folks are calling this ‘policy whiplash.’ Why the sudden about-face? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is playing some 5D chess with Beijing, tying the chip sales to rare earth minerals negotiations. Turns out, those shiny AI chips are a lot less useful without the rare metals that China practically has on speed-dial.

Congress, however, is in full ‘red alert’ mode. Representative John Moolenaar’s sounded the klaxons, warning that letting Chinese firms like DeepSeek bulk up on H20 chips turbocharges Beijing’s AI sector—letting their AI rivals pull closer to the US, both economically and, maybe, militarily. Moolenaar’s logic: every advance in China’s generative AI is a future threat to American tech hegemony.

Policy gets whiplashier still. Trump’s freshly minted AI Action Plan talks a big game on protecting chip tech but dodges the details—no sign yet of hard enforcement methods or coordination strategies with tech giants or international allies. The plan hints at new approaches like chip location verification and clamping down not just on whole chips but the bits and bobs that make cutting-edge processors run. So, yes, the future holds more executive orders, more ambiguous guidelines, and plenty of room for interpretation.

Industry’s reaction? Nvidia, AMD, and EDA software vendors like Synopsys and Cadence are popping the champagne—they just recovered a revenue stream and market access that Wall Street thought was lost. On the flip side, US hawks fear these concessions grease China’s path to self-reliance in AI hardware, putting America’s current edge at risk.

Strategically, there’s an arms race not just in hardware, but in innovation theft. The US Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property claims as much as $600 billion a year is siphoned to China via tech theft, IP infringement, and old-fashioned cyber-espionage. China’s game plan? Out-innovate, out-scale, and undercut the West—building tomorrow’s tech stack with today’s borrowed, stolen, or bought expertise.

Every signal says the cyber front is just heating up. With vulnerabilities like SharePoint’s ‘ToolShell’ now being weaponized at scale and chip export rules in flux, expect Beijing and Washington to keep playing leapfrog, each scrambling to define—and secure—the next global standard for AI and cybersecurity.

That’s your download from Beijing Bytes! I’m Ting, grateful you survived this torrent of tech drama. Don’t forget to subscribe, patch your systems, and tune in next time for the hacks, the hijinks, and the headlines shaping our digital age.

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