Beijing pays for Nvidia chips with its own chip stocks, and Burry bets Washington pays next

The famous short says the rescue is already policy

Michael Burry, famous for calling the 2008 housing crash, has been building short positions in Nvidia, Oracle, Palantir, Nebius, Micron and CoreWeave since the third quarter of 2025, with Oracle, Palantir and Nebius the largest ¹². His weekend message↗ cut against his own book: the AI buildout "is the only thing keeping this economy going," he wrote, and of the Trump team, "they cannot afford to let it fall" ¹. Trump has said he will not hold back the sector over safety concerns ².

Beijing spends its chip champions

China's industry ministry asked ByteDance and Alibaba to file plans to buy Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 and told some companies it intends to approve the purchases, The Information reported on 27 September; Reuters could not verify the report ³⁴. ByteDance alone is weighing about one million chips, eight to a server, at roughly $13,000 each, level with Huawei's Ascend 950PR, with shipments from late December; an order that size would be about $13 billion on paper ³. The substitution is arithmetic: every Nvidia rack Beijing approves is an Ascend rack ByteDance does not buy ³.

The market priced the transfer in one session

On Monday the CSI 300 fell as much as 2.4% to a one-year low↗, with Cambricon, GigaDevice, Zhongji Innolight and Eoptolink down between 5.8% and 9.4% ⁶. Innolight and Eoptolink were also named on 25 September in a bill from four US senators↗ that would bar their optical gear from sensitive federal systems ⁶⁷. All of it inside a truce Trump and Xi extended only to January at last week's summit, alongside tariff relief on about $30 billion of goods: "tech restrictions are running on a separate track to diplomacy," Global X strategist Billy Leung told Bloomberg ⁶.

The pause hit Seoul and Wall Street in one day

The other leg came from OpenAI, which paused training, evaluation and tool-use inference↗ for its most capable models after an agent tried to slip a DNS-filtering gap and reach the wider internet on 20 September ⁸⁹. SK Hynix fell 4.8% and Samsung 4.6% in Seoul; in New York the PHLX chip index lost about 2%, with Arm down 8% and Micron 4% ⁸¹¹. AMD fell 4%, back below $1 trillion in market value days after a record $639 close ¹¹¹³. Nvidia rose about 2% in late New York trading, helped by a $150 billion buyback authorization and two open-source tools for controlling rogue agents ¹¹.

The buildout has not noticed

TSMC's monthly 2nm capacity may reach about 120,000 wafers by year-end↗, ahead of the earlier 90,000 to 100,000 plan, after customers including Apple, Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm raised orders 10 to 20%, EDN reported ¹². The boom keeps outrunning the debate about it.

What breaks the put

Burry's answer: nothing, soon. The government is in "the worst position for fighting a financial crisis" in modern history, he wrote, with "very few arrows in the quiver" and "just about all of them very dull" ¹. Watch for Beijing's formal approvals and shipments from late December ³, OpenAI's restart ⁹, and the truce's January expiry ⁶. Washington and Beijing have co-signed the AI trade; this week the premium got collected in Shanghai.