What's up: Inside Trump's chip export deal; How Mastercard drives AI adoption; GitHub CEO steps down

Good morning. The drama around AI, chips and power-intensive data centers is playing out at a geopolitical level. Billions are pouring into the development of new models such as OpenAI's GPT-5, and policy around the export of chips is a matter of superpower diplomacy.

The real battle is just beginning, though.Trillion-dollar bets assume that AI will penetrate every aspect of the economy and peoples' lives.Those investments and deals only make sense to the extent that demand for such resources lives up to expectations. 

Deal by deal, we see mounting evidence of the ways in which AI is making its presence felt everywhere. Today, the WSJ Leadership Institute's Belle Lin has an exclusive look at how General Catalyst is leading a $74 million investment in Titan, a holding company that says it aims to transform the mundane aspects of IT services with AI. 

And scroll down for Belle's newsletter-exclusive conversation with MasterCard, which explains how it is driving AI adoption inside the company.

Over time, that is how the AI economy will play out, one step after another. As for the geopolitical drama of the moment, much more on that below.

How is your AI drama going? Use the links at the end of this email and let us know. 

The latest on Trump’s plan to take 15% of AI chip sales to China. The decision by the Trump administration to charge Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China opens up several legal and national-security concerns, the WSJ reports.

Is it legal? The administration will have to come up with a new structure for export licenses being approved by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security. They will need a creative approach because the Export Control Reform Act, which gives BIS authority to enact export controls, says no fee can be imposed in connection with license applications and the Constitution prohibits the federal government from imposing taxes or duties on items exported from the U.S., the WSJ said.

How Nvidia's CEO bought his way out of the trade battle. People in China’s tech industry said they appreciated Jensen Huang’s efforts to modify his chips so they could be sold in China. Engineers there nicknamed him “Magic Tailor” for his skill in designing chips to thread the needle of U.S. regulations, the WSJ reports.

New and dangerous. “To call this unusual or unprecedented would be a staggering understatement,” Stephen Olson, a former U.S. trade negotiator told Bloomberg. “What we are seeing is in effect the monetization of U.S. trade policy in which U.S. companies must pay the U.S. government for permission to export. If that’s the case, we’ve entered into a new and dangerous world,” said Olson, who is now with Singapore-based ISEA — Yusof Ishak Institute.

It could have been a bigger hit. Trump said that he initially asked Nvidia for a 20% cut of the chipmaker’s sales to China, but the number came down to 15% after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang negotiated, according to CNBC. Trump said that he wouldn’t allow Nvidia’s more advanced Blackwell chips to be sold to China without performance downgrades, CNBC said.

Forget the White House sideshow. Intel must decide what it wants to be. The identity question—whether Intel wants to be a chip designer, a manufacturer, or remain both of those things—was possible to gloss over in CEO Lip-Bu Tan's early days as chief executive. It was a challenge he could delay confronting as he focused on cost-cutting and getting its chip development back on track, the WSJ says. Now, with tensions bubbling in Washington, D.C., and between Tan and his board, his lack of a long-term strategy has become much harder to ignore.

WSJ Leadership Institute sat down with Mastercard Chief AI and Data Officer Greg Ulrich and Head of Security Solutions Johan Gerber to discuss how the payment network company is increasing the usage of its internally-deployed AI tools. The company uses Microsoft Copilot, Ulrich said, and is testing other agentic tools for various engineering applications. Here are highlights:

WSJLI: How do you encourage Mastercard employees to actually use AI tools?

Ulrich: The efficacy of [the AI tools] is really tied to the deployment, the training, the change management you give people to make sure they're using it. We've done a whole bunch over the last year and year and a half to really increase usage and get people to use it in impactful ways.

The first couple months were unimpressive in terms of adoption. We gave it to people—not a lot happened. Then we decided to create all of our own training programs around it. We didn't feel like the stock, off-the-shelf information was useful, so we put a lot of energy and effort into the adoption, into the training, into best practices.

We created communities of people. We created gamification about competitions amongst different users in different regions, within teams to see who is getting the most impact out of it, and now, our adoption rate has been staggering.

--Belle Lin

GitHub CEO Dohmke to Depart Microsoft. The chief executive officer of GitHub, Microsoft’s coding unit, plans to leave the company after about four years in the role, WSJ reports. Thomas Dohmke said Monday he plans to stay on through the end of 2025 before departing to become a startup founder once again. GitHub and its leadership team will become part of Microsoft’s CoreAI unit, Dohmke said in a blog post.

Truth Social host Rumble weighs near $1.2 billion deal for Northern Data. Rumble said it was considering making an offer for the company which would give it control of Northern Data's cloud business, Taiga, and its large-scale data center arm, Ardent, with plans to integrate both into its own operations, Reuters reports.

C3 AI stock falls 26% as CEO Siebel calls preliminary sales numbers ‘completely unacceptable’. The enterprise AI company C3 AI said Friday that it expects to report revenue between $70.2 million and $70.4 million for its fiscal first quarter 2026, though those figures are unaudited, preliminary estimates. The company reported $87.2 million in revenue during the same period a year earlier, CNBC reports.

President Trump said on Monday that he plans to nominate E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Antoni, a longtime critic of the agency’s handling of jobs data, had the support of conservatives like former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. (WSJ)

President Trump deployed National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., and placed the city’s police department under federal control, launching an unprecedented effort to take charge of the nation’s capital. (WSJ)

An explosion at a U.S. Steel facility in Pennsylvania killed at least one person and injured 10 more, authorities said Monday. The explosion occurred at the Clairton Coke Works in Clairton, Pa., roughly 15 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, at about 10:50 a.m. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.