By Karen Frefield, Alexandra Alper, David Shepardson, Bhargav Acharya and Stephen Nellisr
WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday gave a formal green light to China-bound sales of Nvidia’s second most powerful AI chips, putting in place a rule that will likely kickstart shipments of the H200 despite deep concerns among China hawks in Washington.
According to the regulations, the chips will be reviewed by a third-party testing lab to confirm their technical AI capabilities before they can be shipped to China, which cannot receive more than 50% of the total amount of chips sold to American customers.
Nvidia will need to certify there are enough H200s in the US while Chinese customers must demonstrate “sufficient security procedures” and cannot use the chips for military purposes. The conditions had not been established previously.
Nvidia said the move by Trump “strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America” and will help the company compete in the global chip market.
“The administration’s critics are unintentionally promoting the interests of foreign competitors on US entity lists. America should always want its industry to compete for vetted and approved commercial business, supporting real jobs for real Americans,” Nvidia said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump announced last month he would allow the chip sales in exchange for a 25% fee for the US government. The decision drew fire from China hawks across the US political spectrum over concerns the chips would supercharge Beijing’s military and erode the US advantage in artificial intelligence.
Jay Goldberg, an equities analyst with Seaport Research, said the caps on exports appeared to be a compromise that put some restrictions on Nvidia’s China sales but might be difficult to enforce.
“As we have seen, (Chinese) companies have found ways to get access to the chips, and the US government appears highly transactional in its approach to chip exports,” Goldberg said.
“Put another way, this looks like a Band-Aid, a temporary attempt to cover the huge gap among the US government’s export policy makers.”
CHINESE H200 ORDERS TOP 2-MILLION
Chinese technology companies have placed orders for more than two million H200 chips priced at about $27,000 (R441,955) each, Reuters reported last month, exceeding Nvidia’s inventory of 700,000 chips.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company was ramping up production of H200 chips amid strong demand from China and the rest of the world that was driving up the price to rent the H200 chips sitting in cloud computing data centres.
Saif Khan, who served as director of technology and national security on the White House national security council under former president Joe Biden, said the rule would substantially boost China’s AI capabilities.
“The rule would allow about two million advanced AI chips like the H200 to China, an amount equal to the compute owned today by a typical US frontier AI company,” Khan said.
“The administration will also face challenges enforcing the rule’s know-your-customer requirements that restrict Chinese cloud providers from supporting nefarious uses.”
Such concerns had prompted the Biden administration to bar sales of advanced AI chips to China. But the Trump administration, led by White House AI czar David Sacks, argues shipping advanced AI chips to China discourages Chinese competitors - such as heavily sanctioned Huawei - from redoubling efforts to catch up with Nvidia’s and AMD’s most advanced chip designs.
When Trump announced the sales last month, he said they would be exported to China “under conditions that allow for continued strong national security”.
However, questions have arisen around whether the administration would in practice impose any limits on the chip shipments, or if Beijing would allow their sales domestically.
Reuters reported last month the US had launched a review that could result in the first shipments of the chips to China.
