The Chips Don't Fall Where You Think They Do
Thursday, October 30, 2025 — 8:47 AM
Here's what just happened, and I'm still spinning.
Trump lands in South Korea. Media prepped to cover a historic 90-minute sitdown with Xi. Expectations built around Nvidia's Blackwell chips like it was the nuclear football. The fentanyl tariffs getting cut. Rare earths coming off the table. A truce that actually holds. Equity futures rallying. Bitcoin rallying. The whole machine humming.
Then Trump walks off the plane and tells reporters—and I'm paraphrasing because the cognitive whiplash is real—that Blackwell is not on the table, actually. It's just... other chips. Lots of other chips. Undefined chips. Chips that might have already been cleared but we'll let Nvidia go ask nicely.
Do you understand what just happened?
The market priced in Blackwell approval. Not "Nvidia will get a conversation." Not "we'll negotiate." Blackwell. The chip that makes Nvidia Nvidia. The $5 trillion company—yes, $5 trillion, we're not even pretending this is a meme anymore—got valued on the premise that access to China's markets would explode once the ex-Soviet-style chip embargo lifted.
And then it didn't. Not yet. Maybe never.
Nvidia futures were up 0.8% premarket. The equity index futures went from +0.2% to nearly flat. Bitcoin went from $111K territory to touching $109K. This is the market processing a bait-and-switch, except no one switched anything. Everyone just misread what was being baited.
Here's the deeper texture: Trump said fentanyl tariffs are dropping from 20% to 10%. He said rare earths are off the table for a year. He called the meeting a 12 out of 10. By any historical measure, this is a win for tariff reduction, trade normalization, and de-escalation between the world's two largest economies. AND YET. The market sold first and asked questions after.
Why? Because Nvidia carries $5 trillion in expectations. Because retail traders have been riding the AI trade like it's going to Jupiter. Because somewhere in the last six months we collectively forgot that when you're priced for perfection, anything less is a disappointment. Including victory.
Let's look at what's actually in the deal. Trump confirmed that rare earth controls are suspended for at least one year, and the fentanyl tariff drops from 20% to 10%. The broader tariff rate went from 57% to 47% on certain goods. China suspended its latest rare earth export restrictions and special port fees targeting US ships.
For a normal trade deal between rival powers? This is massive. For a market that spent three weeks pricing in unfettered Blackwell access and the collapse of the tariff regime? This is a reversion to baseline with a sprinkle of hope.
And here's where it gets interesting: Trump explicitly told reporters aboard Air Force One that he did not discuss approving Blackwell exports to China with Xi, saying only that "they're going to be talking to Nvidia and others about taking chips" and "a lot of chips," but not Blackwell.
The specificity matters. Trump didn't accidentally leave Blackwell off the menu. He walked back the speculation. He did this intentionally, probably because someone on his economic team reminded him that allowing America's most advanced military-grade AI chips into China's hands might be the kind of policy reversal that gets interrogated during a reelection cycle.
So here we are. The mega-cap tech index nods approvingly at trade peace, then immediately remembers it didn't get its candy. Bitcoin blinks and goes lower. The CPI came in soft, the manufacturing and services data beat expectations, but consumer confidence hit a five-month low driven by price anxiety and job concerns. Translation: the consumer is exhausted. Inflation's cooling but your wallet still feels smaller.
Meanwhile, the Nasdaq and S&P are tracking toward all-time highs despite the chaos, because apparently momentum and inertia still matter more than introspection.
What matters next is literally happening now. Apple reports earnings today, along with Amazon, Coinbase, Eli Lilly, and others. This is the moment where market participants stop trading on geopolitical theater and start trading on whether the companies can actually deliver the margins and revenue growth their valuations demand.
If Apple walks through with strong guidance and better-than-expected services growth, the market forgets this morning's disappointment before lunch. If anything cracks, if revenue guides down even modestly, if margin guidance suggests the AI capex party is getting expensive, then the Blackwell whipsaw becomes the first domino.
The trade deal is real. The tariff relief is material. Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) is literally printing Bitcoin by issuing preferred stock, and now sits on 640,808 Bitcoin worth $47.44 billion. The crypto market is absorbing risk and moving forward.
But the market is also revealing something about itself: it's not interested in normal good news anymore. It only wants the extraordinary. It's addicted to the surprise. It's running on fumes of certainty and will drop everything the moment someone suggests the base case might hold instead of everyone winning all at once.
Blackwell will happen eventually. Nvidia will fine. The trade deal is fine. The economy is fine.
But "fine" doesn't rally 5 trillion-dollar companies.
That's why the chips didn't fall where you expected them to.