Azeem Azhar

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7,268 appearances 34 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 25 Mar

Azeem Azhar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.

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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View · Why China builds while America debates, with Dan Wang · 1 Oct 2025 podcast

Is there a different interpretation to that?

I think one of the challenges is going to be about that intersection between process knowledge, which I think is very closely related to the learning curve and writing learning, which essentially means that the more you make of a complex engineered product, the cheaper it is per unit, independent of the scale costs.

That is what drives these exponential curves.

And

the way that subsidies now land for things like EVs in China, it's really marginal.

So when BYD ships a car for 40,000 euros in Europe, there's just not a ton of Chinese government subsidy, if any, in that.

And they have that advantage higher up the chip curve.

It's almost as if you try to compete with Intel 30 years into Moore's law having started.

So you're behind that curve and you're certainly behind that curve around things like solar panels and almost certainly around batteries.

So what does it actually take to be able to compete?

Because at some point, political considerations aside, and I may not care where I buy my battery from, price is going to be a determining factor.

Well, you know, the thing is, it's not so much necessarily that they're Chinese.

It is that they've marched so far down the learning curve.

There's so much embedded knowledge that the product that is produced is going to be of a higher quality.

You know, it's why

The chips being produced by Intel were better than the chips being produced by other companies in the late 90s and not so true today.

And I guess the question that I have is, is it possible to, you know, what are the ways in which you leap over that?

Otherwise, as a government or an economy,

you put yourself in this really difficult position, which is you're buying capital equipment, machines, consumer spending that are key factors to welfare, but you're essentially paying more for getting less, which is a path to relative immiseration, right?

So that feels to me like quite a gnarly problem to tackle.

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