Conclusion: “The West’s technology brains and universities are arming China.” I’m not sure what technology brains are. I’m sure that Geoffrey Cain has aptly summarized how the West has been willy-nilly helping to arm the Chinese government (The Spectator, April 13, 2026)
SuperMicro. The federal government recently indicted Ting-Wei Sun and SuperMicro cofounder Yih-Shyan Liaw for diverting shipments of “advanced AI servers from SuperMicro, one of Silicon Valley’s most important hardware companies, to buyers in China,” a scheme that included setting up dummy servers to fool a Commerce Department inspector about where the real servers were really going.
But this kind of law-breaking is often unnecessary. “For the past two decades, western technology brains and companies have been feeding China’s war machine—sometimes potentially in violation of the law, but more often in careful compliance with its letter. The indictment alleges the crudest version. What the rest of the industry does legally may be more damaging, because nobody is trying to stop it.” That nobody is trying to stop it is not strictly correct. But this is how things often seem.
Nvidia. Sale of Nvidia’s high-end chips to China “is restricted for good reason. They are the hardware that is allegedly used to power the surveillance systems that have helped Beijing intern more than a million Uyghurs….
“Yet since Washington first restricted the sale of advanced AI chips to China in 2022, NVIDIA has responded not by pulling back, but by playing the line. The company designed three China-specific processors, each trimmed just enough to slip beneath the latest restriction. Analysts estimated one model alone was worth $12 billion a year in Chinese revenue. When even the most restricted of these was banned in April 2025, NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang personally lobbied the White House. The ban was reversed after three months.”
Microsoft. For years, Microsoft relied—why?—on engineers based in China “to maintain sensitive cloud systems at the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Treasury, supervised by American hires [that Microsoft] called ‘digital escorts’ who often lacked the technical skills to understand what their charges were doing.”
Finally, in 2025, Microsoft stopped using the China-based engineers after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth noticed an expose in ProPublica. Congress then outlawed the practice.
ProPublica: “Various people involved in the work told ProPublica that they warned Microsoft that the arrangement is inherently risky, but the company launched and expanded it anyway.”
Getting the CCP out of the Pentagon’s systems is only “a start,” says Cain. The deeper problem “is what western-trained scientists have already taken home in their heads. Microsoft’s celebrated Beijing research lab is widely regarded as the elite academy of China’s AI industry. It’s the place where the country’s best developers go to train before fanning out across its tech sector. The lab, called Microsoft Research Asia, has operated for more than 25 years with what the company calls appropriate ‘guardrails.’ But the guardrails did not follow anyone out the door.” One alumnus, Li Shipeng, has worked on surveillance tech used to intern Uyghurs and is now helping develop AI for managing drone swarms.
How Microsoft and many other U.S. tech firms directly helped China develop its “digital police state” has been reported at length elsewhere.
Imagination Technologies. “In 2017, a Chinese state-backed fund acquired Imagination Technologies, one of the UK’s two leading semiconductor design firms, for around $733 million. The same fund had simultaneously been trying to buy an American chipmaker, Lattice Semiconductor, but Donald Trump personally blocked that deal on national security grounds. The British acquisition was allowed to proceed.”
The Chinese government demanded that a former CEO of Imagination hand over British chip designs and fired him when he refused. But the technology ended up in the hands of Chinese chipmakers anyway. “Britain still has no published China strategy, no framework for deciding what technology is off-limits.”
Universities. Academic researchers in the U.S. and Great Britain collaborate with Chinese researchers who have ties to the People’s Liberation Army or the creators of China’s mass surveillance system. The collaborations seem to be attended by no limits or guardrails of any kind.
“Companies, universities, governments—at every level, the pattern is the same.” The pattern—not universal, but common—is marked by negligence, indifference, and the cynical conviction that “China will find a way around the barriers regardless.” Why decline to assist evil when doing so reduces revenue and evil will always find a way anyway?
