When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended a $1 million-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week, a chip known as the H20 may have been on his mind.
That's because chip industry insiders widely expected the Trump administration to impose curbs on the H20, the most cutting-edge AI chip U.S. companies can legally sell to China, a crucial market to one of the world's most valuable companies.
Following the Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course on H20 chips, putting the plan for additional restrictions on hold, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The planned American export controls on the H20 had been in the works for months, according to the two sources, and were ready to be implemented as soon as this week.
The change of course from the White House came after Nvidia promised the Trump administration new U.S. investments in AI data centers, according to one of the sources.
American lawmakers have been pressuring the Trump administration for weeks to place stricter curbs on cutting edge technology related to artificial intelligence. In February, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., jointly called for export controls on the H20 chip after Chinese tech company DeepSeek unveiled a breakthrough AI chatbot that stunned the world in January.
It is unclear if Huang spoke directly to Trump during the Friday event, but two sources say until then, the assumption had been that Washington's trade war with China would soon include tight controls on the H20 chip — which were among the chips used by DeepSeek.
Despite mounting political pressure to broaden American export controls to cover the H20 chip, the regulatory process has encountered delays, in part because of a lack of staff at the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the Commerce Department office responsible for designing and enforcing such controls, according to a third person familiar with the agency's operations who was also not authorized to speak publicly.
BIS has been hobbled by federal cuts and reshuffling under the Trump administration. The country's most senior export control expert, Matthew Boreman, left BIS this year as part of an exodus in February of senior agency staff.
Posted by John3262005
6 Comments
Blatant corruption. We’re really turning into a Banana Republic, aren’t we?
National security is for sale, and it’s not even that expensive
This is probably good, even if it might have happened under dubious circumstances. Continually expanding export restrictions further and further down is not the move.
Just $1,000,000 to stop regulation that could cost Nvidia many more millions? Clearly, Trump hasn’t read his own book.
When people tell you there’s too much money in politics, talk about examples like this: Based on how much this is worth to Nvidia, there’s nowhere near enough money in politics
We used to joke amongst ourselves here in Finland that the Russian Federation did not have a good set of institutions, because there were more than once when a question of a Finnish company operating in Russia had to be solved with a personal phone calls between the presidents.