President Donald Trump said Monday that Nvidia will be allowed to sell advanced computer chips to China, with the United States taking a cut of sales — a significant win for the chipmaker and its chief executive, Jensen Huang.
Nvidia will be granted permission to sell its H200 chips — which are used in generative and large language model (LLM) artificial intelligence and other high performance computing — to “approved customers” in China and other countries, Trump said in a social media post.
The H200 chip is almost six times more powerful than Nvidia’s H20 chip, according to a report released Sunday by the Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank focused on innovation. The Trump administration halted H20 chip sales to China in April, but reversed that decision in July — sparking bipartisan concern on the security ramifications of the concessions.
Huang, who has found favor with the president, has successfully lobbied the Trump administration to back the global sale of Nvidia chips. This represents a significant departure from the stance of the Biden administration, which put in place export controls to keep the chips out of the reach of China’s military, and could earn the company billions from overseas sales.
In his post, Trump said that “$25% will be paid to the United States of America.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for clarification on whether that percentage referred to export sales revenue.
In August, Nvidia and another U.S.-based chip manufacturer, Advanced Micro Devices, agreed to pay the U.S. 15 percent of their revenue from sales of the H20 AI chip in China as a prerequisite to export license approval, The Washington Post reported. That deal drew criticism from experts who said it could be in violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on taxes on exports.
Trump said Monday that the Commerce Department is “finalizing the details” and similar approvals would be provided for AMD and Intel.
He added that the deal does not include two other Nvidia products: Blackwell, its most advanced chip, and the yet-to-be-launched Rubin.
Nvidia, the first company in history to be valued at $5 trillion, became a giant on the back of the rise of AI. The company makes graphics processing units (GPUs) and software key to running AI algorithms.
In an emailed statement, a Nvidia spokesperson said the decision would “allow America’s chip industry to compete to support high paying jobs and manufacturing in America.”
“Offering H200 to approved commercial customers, vetted by the Department of Commerce, strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America,” the statement said.
Chinese state-backed news outlet Guancha hailed Trump’s announcement, calling the H200 decision “the first-ever major easing of the U.S. tech containment policy against China” — a reflection of Beijing’s security concerns over the H20 chip.
“The U.S. itself is tearing down the ‘wall of chips’ painstakingly built up during the Biden administration,” Guancha said in an editorial.
“From a broader perspective, this should certainly be interpreted as a diplomatic win for China and an overture of goodwill from Trump, which shows that China has the better cards in the strategic rivalry with the U.S.,” it added.
Trump has reported significant holdings in Nvidia: He owned between $615,000 and $1.3 million in the company’s shares as of the end of last year, according to financial disclosure documents.
Trump called Huang an “incredible guy” during a speech to CEOs at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation gathering in South Korea last month. Huang was among the contributors to the privately funded White House ballroom and has praised Trump as “working like mad to help America be great.”
Lyric Li, Eva Dou and Cat Zakrzewski contributed to this report.
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