(The Epoch Times)—Sens. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are seeking answers from Nvidia about the AI chip company’s planned facility expansion in China.
In a May 28 letter, the senators demanded plans for the center, including timelines, salaries, the type of work it will house, and whether Nvidia will receive benefits or support from the Chinese regime or local authorities in this project.
Pointing to reports that claimed Nvidia was looking to develop local talent at the Shanghai facility and meet the demands of local customers in a way that satisfied U.S. export controls, the senators criticized the company as “reckless and short-sighted.”
Nvidia’s plans to develop a research and development facility in China were reported earlier this month, and the company responded in statements to the media that it would not be redesigning its chips in China or sending graphics processing unit designs to China.
Regarding the letter, an Nvidia spokesperson told The Epoch Times on May 29 that “NVIDIA is simply leasing a new space for existing employees, who need the room in the post-COVID return to work.”
“The scope of work will remain unchanged,” the spokesperson said.
Talent
One of the lawmakers’ concerns is intellectual property theft, and they asked what safeguards Nvidia would put in place.
Companies operating in China, whether they are Chinese or foreign companies, are subject to laws that authorize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to seize information and property. The senators say Nvidia’s presence in China means it is exposed to “continuous pressure” to comply with demands such as forced technology transfers and state-backed espionage.
The lawmakers say this access would then bolster a foreign adversary.
“Microsoft and Intel’s presence in the PRC [People’s Republic of China] helped seed a generation of Chinese startups that supported the CCP’s technology goals, NVIDIA now risks doing the same for AI technology,” the letter reads.
Nvidia’s website lists 83 job postings for positions based in China, compared to 572 in the United States.
“It is troubling that American firms are helping the PRC build cutting-edge semiconductor capacity, which will aid the country’s defense-industrial complex and techno-authoritarian capacity,” the letter reads.
The senators say the plant will erode lawmakers’ trust in Nvidia, which they have viewed “as a critical player in maintaining technological leadership against strategic adversaries.
“Please explain why NVIDIA would choose to enrich an authoritarian country’s innovation ecosystem by establishing a research center in the PRC rather than conducting this research at facilities located in the United States or allied nations, where NVIDIA could employ Americans or allies’ citizens,” the letter reads.
Export Controls
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a vocal critic of U.S. export controls on semiconductor technology to China.
Nvidia is one of the several semiconductor companies that develop products specifically for the Chinese market to satisfy the specific limits the United States puts on these technologies.
The United States began restricting the sales of these technologies to China in 2022, requiring companies to obtain licenses to export to some companies and blacklisting others altogether.
Huang said the controls have been a “failure,” telling investors on a May 28 earnings call that all they have done is keep American companies out of a $50 billion market where rivals are developing their own AI stack.
“The AI race is not just about chips; it’s about which stack the world runs on as that stack grows to include 6G and quantum, U.S. leadership is at stake,” he said.
Huang said the export controls had been based on the assumption that China could not make its own AI chips, which is “clearly wrong.”
The senators criticized Nvidia’s continued business in the Chinese market, saying the company “risks violating the spirit, if not the written word, of U.S. export control regulations.”
“What does NVIDIA envision as the outcomes of this work? Does NVIDIA seek to substantially increase the AI capabilities of chips while technically staying below export control thresholds? If so, provide details on the magnitude of performance improvement NVIDIA is seeking,” the lawmakers wrote.
Trump Administration
The Trump administration has continued the Biden-era semiconductor export controls, announcing in April that an AI chip Nvidia developed specifically to sell to China while satisfying U.S. export controls would now also be restricted. Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle had pushed for export controls on this chip as well.
Reports of Nvidia developing a new chip for China to satisfy the latest restrictions came soon after the export control was announced. During the May 28 earnings call, Huang said, “We don’t have anything at the moment, but we’re looking at it, we’re considering it.”
Huang praised President Donald Trump for his approach to AI diffusion despite criticizing the continued export controls, pointing to how the president opened the way for Middle Eastern states to invest in American AI earlier this month.
“The president has a plan. He has a vision, and I trust him,” Huang said.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.