The fierce debate behind Trump’s move on selling AI chips to China |
This week, President Donald Trump announced that he would allow US chipmaker Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to China, describing the move as overturning a failed Biden administration policy that he says “slowed innovation and hurt the American worker.”
He continued, “That era is over.”
The first notable thing about the decision is that it’s a clear victory for Nvidia and its allies in the administration over Washington’s China hawks, who have pushed to block China’s access to the chips needed to develop the most advanced AI models. (Nvidia’s even more cutting edge B200 chips are still off the table.)
The second notable thing is that if this is the end of an era, it’s an era that began during Trump’s own first term. “The original person who pivoted the US away toward a chip control strategy was Trump,” said Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, who studies technology and geopolitics. This era began in earnest with Trump’s bans on supplying US-origin components to the Chinese tech giants ZTE and Huawei in 2019, citing those companies’ links to the Chinese government and military.
Feldstein says it was these moves that first got Chinese leaders thinking seriously about how to escape their vulnerabilities to US-controlled chokepoints in the chip supply chains. (While China has semiconductor manufacturing of its own, the most advanced chips are overwhelmingly designed by US companies — namely Nvidia — and produced in Taiwan with equipment made in the Netherlands.)
This was an area of continuity between the first Trump and Biden administrations. Biden tightened the restrictions on Huawei and also expanded the policy, restricting not only equipment used by Chinese companies to make chips but........