Key Points
- U.S. President Trump suggested he might allow Nvidia to sell a weaker version of its newest AI chip to China.
- This comes after the administration made a deal to take 15% of revenue from other chip sales to China.
- National security experts worry that even a scaled-down version of the powerful Blackwell chip could help China’s military.
- Trump defended the revenue-sharing deal, calling the currently approved H20 chip “obsolete.”
U.S. President Donald Trump suggested on Monday that he might allow Nvidia to sell a less powerful version of its next-generation AI chip to China. The move comes despite widespread fears in Washington that China could use U.S. technology to boost its military capabilities.
Trump’s comments followed the recent confirmation of an unprecedented deal where Nvidia and AMD will give the U.S. government 15% of their revenue from certain chip sales to China. The president defended that deal, calling the current H20 chip that Nvidia sells to China “obsolete.”
Now, Trump seems open to allowing a “somewhat enhanced-in-a-negative-way” version of Nvidia’s newest, most powerful chip, the Blackwell, to be sold to China. He told reporters that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is “coming to see me again about that.”
This idea has China hawks in Washington deeply concerned. They worry that even a scaled-down version of the powerful Blackwell chip could give China a major technological boost.
One former national security official warned that China could buy enough of these chips to “build world-leading, frontier-scale AI supercomputers,” potentially allowing them to “leapfrog America in AI capabilities.”
Nvidia’s current top-of-the-line chip, the U.S. version of the Blackwell, is up to 30 times faster than its predecessor. While Nvidia hasn’t officially announced a scaled-down version for China, Reuters has previously reported that one is in the works.
The president’s comments now bring that possibility into the open, adding another complex layer to the ongoing tech rivalry between the U.S. and China.
