Why China Is More Secretive About Its Supercomputers

[00:00:00] It's 4am and you're sucking baby snot through a tube because she's congested. If you love her that much, love her enough to make sure she's buckled in the right car seat. Find out more at nhtsa.gov slash the right seat.

[00:00:11] Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Thursday, July 25th. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. Donald Trump has embraced crypto of late, becoming the first major party presidential

[00:00:30] candidate to accept campaign donations in cryptocurrencies. We're going to hear about the individual investors who jumped in hoping to encourage Trump's burgeoning support for the digital assets. And then, new secrecy around technological developments is making it harder for the US

[00:00:48] government to answer a question it deems essential to national security. Does the US or China have faster supercomputers? WSJ reporter Stu Wu will join us to discuss. But first, there is an often repeated rule that many crypto fans live by. HODL, or hold on for dear life.

[00:01:14] Slang for don't give up your crypto even when markets go haywire. Yet dozens of everyday investors are parting with their digital currencies, donating it to former President Donald Trump's campaign after he became the first major party presidential candidate to accept crypto donations in May.

[00:01:33] Our reporter Kaitlin Ostroff has been speaking to some of them and she joins us now. So Kaitlin, what have these investors said about why they're donating their crypto to Trump? Yeah, a lot of these people got into crypto many years ago for different reasons.

[00:01:46] And they all support the former president for different reasons and opted when he opened his campaign to crypto donations to give crypto rather than dollars in large part because they view it as a form of encouragement to say you are warming to crypto in ways that you

[00:02:05] haven't previously. We want to encourage that. And so rather than just give you dollars, we're actually going to give you our crypto so that you see that we want to use it. We hold it and we want you to keep supporting it. What is Trump's position on cryptocurrency?

[00:02:22] Trump's position on crypto has evolved rather sharply in the last few months, but significantly from where it was a few years ago. During his first term of his presidency, he said that it was based on thin air. He didn't believe in crypto and often derided it.

[00:02:37] Whereas in the last few months, you've seen kind of this gradual shift from Trump. But really, it's become part of his platform starting around early summer of him saying that the rights of people to transact in crypto should be protected and making it part of

[00:02:54] the Republican Party platform. Can you tell us more about these donors? Yeah, I mean, you have people who like work for the Long Island Railroad. You have people who are engineers. You have people who do missionary work.

[00:03:08] You have a homemaker within the list, a guy who runs a pizza shop in Michigan. A lot of these are just ordinarily normal people who got into it somehow and just view it as one of the issues that they consider in voting for president.

[00:03:26] Trump's campaign revealed last week that it breaked in about $3 million in various tokens through the end of June. Most of that was donated by crypto industry titans and professional investors. Can you tell us who they are and why their support matters?

[00:03:41] Well, their support matters first and foremost because they have the most of the money. The person buying a little bit of crypto here and there who has a day job isn't going to have nearly as much as someone who focuses all of their time on it.

[00:03:54] So you've had people like Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, which listeners might know from their days at Facebook. But these days they run a crypto exchange called Gemini. They each donated about $800,000 a piece, about 1.5 million between the two of them.

[00:04:09] You have another founder of a crypto exchange who also donated a lot of money. And so they alone make up more than half of the amount of money donated in crypto. And that just gives a lot more spending power.

[00:04:24] It's a blip in the about $300 million that was raised across crypto and dollars donations. But it's a lot of money for Trump to tap. These are people who are sitting on gains from the last year. What is Vice President Kamala Harris' position on crypto?

[00:04:43] We don't yet know with Harris being the presumptive Democratic nominee. We don't know what her policy toward crypto might look like. And so one of the things to watch is who her vice presidential funding mate winds up

[00:04:56] being to get a sense of what their positions have been and maybe see if there's a softening or a hardening even happening here. All right, that was our reporter Kaitlin Ostroff. Coming up, China is getting secretive about its supercomputers.

[00:05:11] We'll tell you why and why it matters after the break. It's 4 a.m. and you're sucking baby snot through a tube because she's congested. If you love her that much, love her enough to make sure she's buckled in the right car seat.

[00:05:29] Find out more at NHTSA.gov slash the right seat. Brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Ad Council. For decades, American and Chinese scientists collaborated on supercomputers. These tennis court-sized machines are essential to improving artificial intelligence, developing vaccines and predicting hurricanes.

[00:05:55] Times have changed. Chinese scientists have become more secretive as the U.S. has tried to hinder China's technological progress. Here to tell us more about this divide and why it matters is our reporter Stu Wu. Stu, the U.S. started developing supercomputers in roughly the 1960s.

[00:06:12] When did China enter the supercomputer picture? China has been developing its supercomputer program really fast over the past two decades. A couple of decades ago, they had no machines that were on this list, this top 500 list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

[00:06:27] And then starting around 2017, they became the dominant country on the list. They had more of the world's fastest supercomputers than anybody. What kind of collaboration did the U.S. and China have around supercomputers? Governments, employees, people in the military, they would come together at conferences or

[00:06:45] they would actually go visit. Chinese scientists would come to the U.S. and visit the best supercomputers there and vice versa. So there was really this open exchange in the name of scientific progress. So it was relatively open.

[00:06:56] It wasn't completely open, of course, but there was an exchange of, OK, these are the best practices to developing these supercomputers that could really create technology that changes the world. Tell us more about that top 500 list. What is its purpose and how did it start?

[00:07:11] As supercomputers advanced in the 1990s, some scientists in the U.S. and Germany thought, OK, we should track the progress of supercomputers. We should benchmark them so we know how far we've advanced. It also was just a fun hobby. They didn't get paid to do this.

[00:07:26] So starting in 1993, these scientists collaborated on this top 500 list. They would send out this math problem for scientists to run through their supercomputers and then they would rank the supercomputers on how quickly they solved the problem.

[00:07:39] And then at the end of that, they would put together this list. It's called the top 500 and lists from one to 500 the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. Why is the development of supercomputers important to both countries' national security interests?

[00:07:53] The clearest analogy I got was that you can have an absolute advantage in the military if you have a better supercomputer. So if you can develop a fighter jet or another weapon that's even 1 percent better than your

[00:08:05] opponents, it could detect you first and target you first and then it's game over. There's just a better fighter jet on one side. But it also matters for commercial purposes and other scientific discoveries. If you have a better supercomputer, you could develop a better artificial intelligence chatbot

[00:08:20] and that could lead to economic gains for your country. You could develop a vaccine that could help your pharmaceutical companies or help you with soft power by distributing vaccines around the world.

[00:08:30] What steps has the U.S. government taken that have made it harder for China to develop supercomputers? Yeah, starting in 2015, the Obama administration made it more difficult for Chinese supercomputer developers to buy the parts you need, the computer chips you need, to make the world's fastest supercomputers.

[00:08:48] So the Trump administration increased those export controls in 2019 and the Biden administration has tightened them even farther. And how did China react? How did that change its participation, say, in the top 500? There was this period in 2019 after the Trump administration increased these export controls

[00:09:05] where one of the top economic aides to the Chinese leader went to Chinese scientists and said, you guys need to maintain a low profile. And that seemed to be a real turning point because after that, Chinese scientists stopped

[00:09:17] participating in the top 500 and have generally been less forthright about their progress in supercomputing and other areas of technology. So the theory, although the Chinese government hasn't said it aloud, is that if China brags more about its technological advances, then that might provoke the U.S. into increasing

[00:09:37] export controls that make it harder for China to buy the things it wants. Has the Chinese government said anything official about this? No, for this story, we asked the Chinese government and Chinese scientific agencies for comment and they did not get back to us.

[00:09:52] What about U.S. officials? So the U.S. Commerce Department is in charge of these export controls that make it hard for China to advance its supercomputers. When we asked them about that, a spokeswoman referred us to previous statements that said

[00:10:05] the U.S. is trying to address national security challenges that are posed by China. So Stu, who has the fastest supercomputer these days? So if you look at the official top 500 list, the three fastest supercomputers are in the U.S.

[00:10:20] But when I asked the co-founder whether he thinks are those actually the three fastest, he says no, we don't think so. I think China has some that are faster. How does he know this? Well, OK, so they stopped participating in the top 500, but Chinese scientists have still

[00:10:33] been publishing papers that say, hey, we have this many chips and they're this fast and you can reverse engineer it to figure out that, oh, China has machines that are probably faster than those in the U.S.

[00:10:44] We don't know for sure, but we have enough clues that tell us that they're probably faster. And I ask him, OK, why did they stop participating in this list but still publish this research?

[00:10:53] And he thinks, you know, part of its pride and part of it is you want to let the world know that we do have some fast supercomputers so you can hire the best scientists that they'll want to come to China and work on these supercomputers.

[00:11:05] That was our reporter, Stu Wu. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Zoe Thomas for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.