U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said the decision to allow Nvidia (NVDA) to export its H200 chips to China currently “sits on the desk” of U.S. President Donald Trump.
“That kind of decision sits right on the desk of Donald Trump,” Lutnick said during an interview on Bloomberg. “He’s got (CEO) Jensen (Huang) from Nvidia, who really wants to sell those chips, and he’s got good reasons for it. And there’s an enormous number of people who think that’s something that should be deeply considered. The benefit that we have is we have Donald Trump in the Oval Office, and he is going to weigh those decisions.”
“The president loves to hear lots of different voices to make those kinds of decisions,” Lutnick said. “He’ll decide whether we can sell those chips or not, and we’ll go execute it however he decides to go forward.”
Trump is currently evaluating if it is more of a national security risk to sell China some of these chips or if it is more of a risk not to have U.S. tech in China.
“Do you want to sell China some chips and keep them using our tech and our tech stack, or do you say to them, ‘Look, we’re not going to sell you our best chips. We’re just going to hold off on that, and we’re going to compete in the AI race ourselves,'” Lutnick said.
“It’s on his desk,” Lutnick added. “It’s in his hands. He has all the best experts talking to him, and he will decide which way he goes forward.”
“The regulatory landscape does not allow us to offer a competitive data center GPU in China, leaving that massive market to our rapidly growing foreign competitors,” an Nvidia spokesperson told Seeking Alpha. “Our foreclosure from the China data center compute market has no impact on our ability to supply customers in the U.S.A.”
In July, after months of back-and-forth talks with the U.S. government, Nvidia said it had received U.S. approval to sell a slimmed-down version of its Hopper line of GPUs, the H20, to China.
Earlier this month, it was reported the Chinese government had banned the use of foreign-made AI chips in its state-funded data centers.
Dear readers: We recognize that politics often intersects with the financial news of the day, so we invite you to click here to join the separate political discussion.