Nvidia issues the asset the AI economy settles in, sets its price and decides who is served first. That is central banking, and nobody voted for it.
In April 2025 the United States government informed Nvidia that exporting its H20 processor to China would require a licence. The H20 was already the reduced part, engineered to sit under the previous performance threshold. What happened next is in the company's own annual report: a charge of $4.5 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2026, for excess inventory and purchase obligations, taken "as the demand for H20 products diminished". In August 2025 the government granted licences covering certain customers in China. Nvidia records the revenue earned under those licences as approximately $60 million.
I open on the fact that damages my argument most, because it is real and it is not small. Nvidia does not decide who is allowed to buy from it. One decision by a licensing office turned four and a half billion dollars of committed inventory into a write-down and handed back sixty million.