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

Hey listeners, Ting here, your resident China-cyber-obsessed nerd, and today’s Beijing Bytes is packed, so let’s jack straight into the mainframe.

Over the past two weeks, the big story is Washington trying to throttle and turbocharge China’s tech rise at the same time. According to reporting from Semafor and Asia-based outlets, the US Commerce Department is preparing to let Nvidia ship its H200 GPUs to China – not the absolute bleeding edge, but only about a generation behind. The logic in Washington, as officials quietly admit, is that the ultra-strict AI chip bans didn’t stop Beijing’s progress and just shoved Chinese firms harder toward self-reliance while squeezing Nvidia’s revenue. At the same time, senators rolled out the “Safe Chips Act” to slam the door on anything more powerful, forcing Commerce to deny licenses for top-tier AI chips to China for at least 30 months. So you’ve got Commerce saying “controlled drip,” and Congress saying “nope, shut the valve.”

Layered onto that, Congress just dropped a $900 billion defense bill that’s basically a tech war omnibus. Fox News and policy trackers note it builds an outbound investment screening regime, letting Treasury flag or block US money flowing into Chinese semiconductors, AI, quantum and hypersonics, and bans a swath of Chinese-made biotech, batteries, solar components, and IT gear from Pentagon supply chains. That’s not just decoupling; that’s weaponizing spreadsheets.

On the cyber front, the gloves are off but the tools are stealthy. CrowdStrike and multiple government advisories describe a China-linked espionage actor dubbed Warp Panda quietly burrowing into VMware vCenter and ESXi environments at US legal, tech, and manufacturing firms with a backdoor called BRICKSTORM. CISA, NSA, and their Canadian counterparts warn this is all about long-term persistence in virtualized infrastructure – the crown jewels of modern data centers. Think: living for years as a ghost in your hypervisor.

At the same time, Amazon’s security team and industrial cyber outlets report Chinese operators racing to exploit a new React2Shell vulnerability against cloud and web targets, while Shadowserver is still counting tens of thousands of exposed systems. This isn’t smash-and-grab ransomware; this is access-at-scale so that, when Beijing needs options, it already has beachheads.

Strategically, Asia Times and think tank analysts are reminding everyone that China’s pouring an estimated trillion renminbi into “hard tech” like quantum. The bet is simple: if Beijing hits error-corrected quantum first, it can unlock years of harvested, encrypted US data and potentially blind key parts of American command-and-control. In other words, today’s Warp Panda intrusions might just be building the data lake for tomorrow’s quantum decryption party.

Industry impact? US chipmakers like Nvidia get a lifeline in China, but only at carefully hobbled performance levels; Chinese AI firms must architect around lagging imports while racing domestic alternatives. Defense contractors and biotech suppliers are being forced to scrub Chinese content out of their supply chains. And cloud providers are suddenly treating vCenter and React deployments like critical infrastructure under active siege.

Forecast time: expect a noisy 2026 with three trends. First, more “one and a half step behind” exports: Washington will drip-feed China last-gen chips while trying to keep the true bleeding edge at home. Second, more legal and financial perimeter walls – outbound investment controls, FEOC-style rules spreading beyond solar into batteries, EVs, and maybe AI cloud services. Third, a sharper cyber tempo: Beijing’s operators will keep going after edge devices, virtualization layers, and software supply chains, while the US doubles down on quantum-safe crypto and joint cyber...