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President Trump approved Nvidia's H200 chip sales to China this week, complete with a shiny new 25% tariff on semiconductors transshipped through the US. His pitch to reporters? "China wants them, and we're going to be making 25% of the sale of those chips, basically." Cool. Just one problem: China isn't letting them in.

Hours after the Commerce Department rolled out the red carpet for H200 exports, Reuters reported that Chinese customs agents were told the chips "are not permitted," with one source calling it "basically a ban for now." Nvidia shares dipped less than 1% on the news, which is either a sign of investor confidence or collective denial about a $54 billion sales opportunity evaporating overnight.

President Trump also slapped a 25% tariff on the H200 as a condition for greenlighting sales, meaning Nvidia has to pay Uncle Sam a quarter of the chip's value before shipping it to a country that may not even accept delivery. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has spent months lobbying Washington to ease export controls, arguing that blocking China just helps competitors like Huawei. Now he's got approval to sell, a hefty tariff bill, and a buyer who ghosted him at customs. If this is what winning the AI race looks like, someone might want to check the map.

Wall Street has been calling a data center bubble for two years now. Turns out the real estate underneath those AI chips might just be the safest bet in tech right now. And Andy Power, CEO of Digital Realty (the second-largest data center REIT on the planet), just shut down fears that demand is weak: "Based on actual real demand from real customers with real long-term, 15-year contracts, we are not in an oversupply state today."

Translation: trillion-dollar companies are signing decade-plus leases because they know this AI thing isn't going away. JLL projects global data center capacity will nearly double from 103 gigawatts to 200 gigawatts by 2030, with AI workloads eating up half of all capacity. That's going to require $3 trillion in total investment over the next five years, including $1.2 trillion in real estate value and $870 billion in fresh debt.

The wild part is that vacancies at Digital Realty are the tightest they've ever been. Power's take is simple: "You can't build it fast enough for the customers." While some worry about financing risk (looking at you, Oracle-backed AI startups), the landlords are sleeping just fine. The hyperscalers want to own their real estate, not lease it. And when your tenants include companies with trillion-dollar market caps and actual cash flow, betting against their infrastructure spend seems like a losing hand!

Yes, the U.S. Dept. of Energy really posted a Despicable Me meme about the moon 😂

In this episode, The Best One Yet cuts through AI-market mania to make a contrarian case: while Wall Street chases shiny AI winners, the real leverage sits underneath the whole ecosystem.

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Till next time,
— Brandon and Blake