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“Nvidia and AMD have agreed to share 15% of their revenues from chip sales to China with the U.S. government, as part of a deal to secure export licenses for the semiconductors. The Trump administration halted the sale of advanced computer chips to China in April over national security concerns, but Nvidia and AMD revealed in July that Washington would allow them to resume sales of the H20 and MI308 chips, which are used in artificial intelligence development…
“President Trump confirmed the terms of the unusual arrangement in a Monday press conference while noting that he originally wanted 20% of the sales revenue when Nvidia asked to sell the ‘obsolete’ H20 chip to China. The president credited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for negotiating him down to 15%.” AP News
The left is critical of the decision, arguing that Trump is prioritizing dispensing personal favors over national interests.
“Trump called for a 100 percent tariff on semiconductors, but it had its own exemption for chips from Apple, after CEO Tim Cook literally showed up at the White House with a hunk of gold, a scene that would have been thrown out of a movie about corruption for being too on the nose…
“Trump wants countries and companies flocking to Washington seeking exemptions from his trade tyranny, whether that benefits the country or his own wallet. Yet he’s also happy to bend to China’s demands to relax export controls on chips, if it gets him closer to a summit with Xi Jinping and a deal where the announcement is more important than the substance.”
David Dayen, American Prospect
“The reason the U.S. government previously blocked chip exports to China was national security. Obviously, drawing a few extra billion dollars of tax revenue from chipmakers does not mitigate the risks of transferring advanced technology… Word has gone out that CEOs can kiss the president’s ring by offering to give him something he wants and in return be exempted from whatever policy threatens to damage their business…
“The U.S. government has meddled in private enterprise in the past, especially during wartime, and it has bailed out companies during financial crises. Biden used government largesse to prod companies to give special treatment to unions and minorities. But Trump is the only president to make his dog and pony show an everyday reality of doing business in America.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“The primary winners from this deal are Nvidia and China. For Nvidia, the deal will bring it more sales from top clients — like ByteDance Ltd., parent company of TikTok, or Alibaba Group Holding Ltd… For China, this will help its homegrown AI shops be even more competitive with Western rivals… The move will also give Beijing additional leverage over what is now America’s most valuable company.”
Dave Lee, Bloomberg
“[This] will encourage blackmail by China, whose dominance of rare earths remains a powerful point of leverage. It will make it harder to convince allies such as Japan and the Netherlands to align with the US on future restrictions; they’ll have little incentive to risk sales and Beijing’s ire if they believe the White House could reverse course at any time.”
Editorial Board, Bloomberg
The right is critical of the decision, arguing that it will harm US national security.
The right is critical of the decision, arguing that it will harm US national security.
“Great-power competitions are fundamentally technological contests… AI is already transforming how militaries fight and how economies function. If anything, the geopolitical stakes of the AI race are getting higher, especially considering the potential for artificial general intelligence — systems that reason like humans across a wide range of tasks…
“Chinese firms acknowledge that US export controls have slowed their progress. And as former National Security Council official Ben Buchanan has argued, Trump is now giving China access to just the chips it needs to refine its capabilities in crucial areas such as cyberwarfare and drone attacks.”
Hal Brands, Bloomberg
“If the price of American AI becoming the ‘world’s standard’ means giving China a helping hand, it is not worth it. Moreover, and this is not only the case with Nvidia or AMD, the less dependent that American companies are on Chinese demand (or supply) in anything that matters the better…
“The argument that selling H20s and their kin will make China ‘dependent’ on the U.S. in this area can only be made by those who do not understand how China operates.”
Andrew Stuttaford, National Review
“Ask Nortel Networks or Lucent Technologies how well their strategy of keeping China ‘addicted’ to Western technology worked out. Those telecom giants, now extinct, once dominated global markets and thought that going all in on China would secure their future. Chinese upstarts such as Huawei systematically absorbed their expertise, displaced them in China, and then destroyed their viability globally…
“Soon after Trump approved selling H20s to China, Beijing summoned Nvidia for questioning about chip ‘safety.’ The Communist regime’s aim should be clear: Turn up the heat on Nvidia to reveal its technology so that Chinese chipmakers can replace the American tech giant even faster…
“President Trump should immediately halt all H20 sales to China, block Nvidia’s Blackwell and future China-specific chips, and persist in closing loopholes that let China make, buy, or access advanced AI chips. This is Trump’s legacy moment. Will he be remembered as the president who secured American AI dominance? Or as the president who triggered a second China shock for Nvidia’s short-term profit margins?”
Matt Pottinger and Liza Tobin, Free Press
