First of all, can you set the scene for us? What actually happened at Brussels airport where this arrest took place earlier this year? And what was the arrested man accused of doing?

So in May, a 52-year-old Belgian Chinese man was arrested at the main international airport in Belgium right before he could get on a plane to Beijing.

Belgian prosecutors say the man previously held a senior research position at a newly founded chip company called Belgam.

At the time, it was the only chip manufacturer in Belgium.

The prosecutors added that there are indications this researcher, whose identity has not been publicly announced, but whose lawyer has said that his initials are H.L., was simultaneously working as a director of a Chinese company that sought to make the same type of chips.

It's part of a broader investigation into the failure of the Belgian company, Belgane, which includes espionage, participation in a criminal organization, misuse of company assets, and the unlawful disclosure of company secrets.

So a real juicy investigation.

And what do we know about the company that you mentioned there that the arrested man was working for in Belgium and the links between that company and China? What more detail can you tell us about that?

Are there any downsides that you can see or that you reported on that when you were speaking to people about this from Carr's approach effectively banning some of these Chinese products? Are there any potential, uh, flaws to the way this, he's going about doing this, do you think?

One, there are certainly a few that come up when you talk to people in, uh, the affected industries.

Uh, one is that the types of restrictions that the FCC has put into place apply to companies uniformly, whether they are based in the United States or based in China.

Uh, if they are making goods in China or anywhere outside of the US, then the rules apply to them.

Some people think that you shouldn't treat foreign companies all the same.

You should treat Chinese companies differently if that's who you intend to target than you would treat companies that manufacture, that are based in the US and manufacture in Vietnam, for example.

Another criticism is that these things are going to take some time.

Looking forward, what do you see now? I mean, do you think that the FCC under Carr is gonna carry on in this vein? What other sort of actions could it take, do you think?

What did the U.S. government do about the Chinese companies accused of aiding Iran's war machine? And what did you notice in the related filings?

Since the outbreak of the US war in Iran in February, the United States has stepped up its sanctions against people and companies that it says are supporting the Iranian regime, and in particular, its weapons programs.

But they've taken a broad view of this to include components.

And naturally, China is one of the biggest producers of all sorts of machinery, including the precursors used to make things like drones.

China is also by far the largest buyer of Iranian oil.

So to combat those two things, the U.S. has sanctioned more than 60 Chinese companies this year alone.

The most recent big package of sanctions against Iran included around two dozen Chinese companies.

Is that likely deliberate so as not to upset things ahead of Xi Jinping's summit with Donald Trump in Washington, which is scheduled for September 24th?

so what do NVIDIA's Chinese partners typically do, and why could that actually be a concern for the United States government more broadly?

So in general, NVIDIA divides its partners into more than a dozen categories, and each is slightly different.

But the two most common types of partner NVIDIA has in China are what the company calls a solution provider and what the company calls an original equipment manufacturer or OEM.

Solution provider is primarily a reseller that can include NVIDIA chips and other NVIDIA products.

And an OEM is similar in that it also uses NVIDIA technology, but the difference is that OEMs typically resell under their own brand name rather than using NVIDIA's.

So to give an example of a well-known Chinese OEM that is a partner of NVIDIA is ZTE, which sells its own AI servers, well-known telecom company.

potentially using NVIDIA chips.

Why is that? And what does it say then that there are still plenty of these Chinese interests, it seems, still trying to get hold of advanced NVIDIA chips?

What are the results so far?

So, Rachel, that is a great question, and it's one of the issues that people I spoke to for the story pointed to in NVIDIA's report.

By many metrics, Huawei's chips are just much worse than NVIDIA's, especially compared to those Blackwell's, the newest and greatest NVIDIA chips.

NVIDIA's report contains loads of projections about how many chips Huawei can make and how that is likely to grow pretty rapidly over the next few years, but it doesn't adjust for how much better NVIDIA's chips are.

So it's kind of like if you want to move a bunch of heavy stuff, and on one side you have some of the strongest guys in the world, and on the other you have some regular dudes off the street.

Of course, the strong men are going to be your first choice.

As one analyst told me for the story, there's no apples to apples comparison between Nvidia chips and Huawei chips.

Where does that leave NVIDIA in China?

What is his role in the deal?

So on Rittenberg Senior, as you noted famously, an American aide to Mao Zedong after he left China, though, in 1980, he built a business helping American companies enter China and later made millions that way.

And Rittenberg Junior, his son, grew up in both China and the US.

One of his early jobs was actually working for his dad's business.

And in the mid-2000s, he actually worked at InFocus, too, before John Hui bought it.

He went on to some other roles, but eventually Hui introduced him to Foxconn.

And when he was there, Foxconn founder Terry Guo invited a Chinese entrepreneur named Xu Cheng, whose English name is Forrest, to pitch at Foxconn's headquarters in Shenzhen.

What stood out to you?