Secretive U.S.-China Deal: Could a Rare Pokémon Card Reshape the Global Tech Landscape?

How much is a rare Pokémon card really worth? Enough, apparently, to turn the global chessboard on its head—move over, OPEC, there’s a new negotiating piece in town. In a world where international trade usually fights over oil or microchips, I never imagined we’d stumble into a grand standoff where a PSA 10 Gem Mint holographic Charizard becomes the linchpin for future AI supremacy . Absurd? Completely! But frankly, it speaks volumes about how much value we humans are willing to assign to slippery bits of cardboard—especially when we’re missing just one to complete “the set.” Is this the start of an era where Pokémon cards could alter the fate of entire nations? Part of me is just tickled by the idea, and the other part is panic-scrolling eBay for my own misaligned relics from the ‘90s. If only every trade negotiation could be decided by foil-rare duels and binder bragging rights… I’d watch C-SPAN more often. To see just how wild, weird, and utterly relatable these negotiations get, <ahref="https://theonion.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/USOffersSemi-Conductors-NIB-IHA-GR.jpg”>LEARN MORE.

WASHINGTON—Promising to lift export controls on AI chips if they received the rare first-edition trading card in return, U.S. trade negotiators reportedly offered China access to advanced semiconductors Tuesday in exchange for a holographic Charizard. “We’ll give you state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs if you give us a PSA 10 Gem Mint holographic Charizard,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said to a Chinese trade representative, later explaining to reporters that the Trump administration hoped to shore up America’s complete set of the original 151 and was willing to part with its most sophisticated machine-learning processors to achieve that goal. “You definitely can’t have the chips needed to develop cutting-edge AI without giving us something better than a Blue-Eyes White Dragon, because we already have tons of Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. You’ve been cheating us for years, but now we’re going to rebalance the scales and ensure that American three-ring binders are full of foil cards, full arts, and special illustration rares for generations to come.” At press time, officials confirmed bilateral trade negotiations had collapsed after the United States discovered the holographic Charizard was grossly misaligned, though China claimed it was merely an error card.