Does Xi Need Trump?

Plus: California gas prices, monkey thieves, and more...

Xi and DeepSeek: Chinese artificial intelligence giant DeepSeek has now been optimized to run on Huawei-produced chips, reducing any possible dependence on U.S. products. Announcements last month indicate that DeepSeek is spending way less on chips than American counterparts OpenAI and Anthropic.

But it's "the timing of DeepSeek's announcement—before this week's scheduled summit between President [Donald] Trump and Xi Jinping, China's leader—[that] gives Beijing fresh confidence entering trade talks that U.S. export controls on Nvidia chips have not derailed China's A.I. development," per The New York Times. Trump and Xi are meeting this week to discuss tariffs and trade, among other things, so China's reliance or lack thereof is especially relevant right now. That said, it's possible that access to U.S. chips was necessary for DeepSeek to get to this place: There's suspicion that DeepSeek's models were trained using Nvidia chips before developing reliance on Huawei chips later on.

"Two months after his last meeting with Mr. Xi, Mr. Trump granted Nvidia permission to sell the H200, one of its most powerful chips, to China," notes the Times. "But since then, those chips have been squeezed between lawmakers in Washington, who are seeking closer oversight of their use in China, and Beijing, which has directed Chinese tech companies to buy domestic chips. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate Appropriations Committee last month that no H200s had actually gone to China, and Nvidia said in regulatory filings this year that it had yet to generate any revenue from H200 sales there."

Trump "kind of needs China more than China needs him," Alejandro Reyes, a professor at the University of Hong Kong, told Reuters ahead of Trump's talks with Xi. "He needs a kind of foreign policy victory: a victory that shows that he is looking to ensure stability in the world and that he's not just disrupting global politics," Reyes added. Trump needing China more than China needs him is true not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also in AI advancement; his negotiating position has gotten a lot weaker since he started a trade war.

"We used to be taken advantage of for years with our previous presidents, and now we're doing great with China," Trump told reporters, manifesting his truth. "I respect ​him [Xi] a lot, and hopefully he respects me."

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Highlights from Consumer Price Index report: "Consumer prices in the United States rose at the fastest rate since May 2023 last month, as sharp increases in energy costs caused by war in the Middle East made life more expensive for American consumers," reports The New York Times. "The Consumer Price Index rose 3.8 percent in April from a year earlier, the Labor Department reported on Tuesday, up from a 2.4 percent annual increase before the conflict started in February and a 3.3 percent increase in March." Energy prices are a huge part of the picture, but core inflation also rose.

One interesting tidbit that I have noticed at the grocery store (and it's nice to see it confirmed by the data so I know I'm not crazy): "US average ground beef retail prices surged to a fresh record of $7.056 per pound in April, up 2.8% from the prior month when prices had briefly flattened," reports Bloomberg. "That underscores the persistent tightness of US cattle supplies, even as the country is slated to import a record amount this year to meet beef demand. The US already imported nearly 600,000 tons of beef and beef products in the first quarter of this year, up 16% from the same period in 2025, according to the US Department of Agriculture."

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Scenes from New York: "Independent schools enroll about a third of New York City students," reports The New York Times. "But they are largely not protected by the Police Department's School Safety Division, which has called itself the largest school law enforcement agency in the world. The division patrols public schools, and school safety officers are alerted via radio of nearby incidents."

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QUICK HITS

• "For California, the economic pain of the Iran war will last well beyond the arrival of the next tankers," reports The Wall Street Journal. "U.S. drillers have fled the state and dozens of refineries have closed since the mid-1980s, forcing California to import 75% of the oil it consumes. Almost one-third of that comes from the Middle East, making California more reliant on crude-oil shipments from Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates than any other U.S. state." In California, "gasoline prices averaged $6.16 a gallon Friday, the highest in the U.S. and about $1.61 above the national average. Diesel cost $7.48 a gallon, about $1.82 over the U.S. average."
• Hantavirus update:

We're now at 10 confirmed positive cases from the ship. Which makes sense and aligns with: 1) prior dynamics from land-based outbreak (1 infecting many; no close contact required), and 2) what a doc on the ship shared about his experience that later cases were not 'close contact' https://t.co/f0txjLwYcG

— Joseph Allen (@j_g_allen) May 11, 2026

• I went to this temple in Bali years ago and cannot help but delight in this Wall Street Journal headline: "The Criminal Enterprise Run by Monkeys"
• "Those first years felt so monumental while they were happening, but now they seem like flickering memories from ancient history," writes Larissa Phillips for The Free Press. "Digging through the crumbles to examine them is like deciphering runes from a civilization that doesn't exist anymore. Those babies don't exist anymore. As they grew and changed, they left their old selves behind like shells they had shed and discarded. They became more independent, so each new stage was a relief; I caught my breath, started reading again, returned to working and writing. But later I would look back and miss those smaller versions of my children and the diminishing closeness we'd never have again, how they used to lean against me and climb into my lap and wrap their arms around my neck, and considered me their home base, their safest and best place."
• A good point that's kind of hard to believe:

One of my favorite stats that serves as a reality check for people:

The median American took zero flights last year. https://t.co/SsRHHEQeCo

— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) May 9, 2026