A back-and-forth battle over the potential export of Nvidia graphics processing units to China continued on Monday with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying President Donald Trump is to weigh in on the matter.
Mr Lutnick said Nvidia's H200 GPU was at the centre of discussions at the White House on the kind of semiconductors Beijing would be allowed to obtain.
“That kind of decision sits right on the desk of Donald Trump,” Mr Lutnick told Bloomberg TV while in Brussels for meetings with EU officials.
“He's got Jensen [Huang] from Nvidia, who really wants to sell those chips, and he's got a good reason for it, and there's an enormous number of other people who think that that's something that should be deeply considered.”
Officials have expressed concerns over national security and sought to keep China away from US-designed technology amid the global race for AI dominance.
Last week, the Department of Justice arrested two US citizens for conspiring to “illegally export cutting-edge Nvidia” GPUs to China. Two Chinese citizens residing in the US were also arrested and charged.
According to the indictment, the suspects managed to export about 400 Nvidia A100 GPUs between 2024 and 2025, and those involved in the smuggling received more than “$3.89 million in wire transfers” from China.
“Despite knowing that licenses were required to export these items to the PRC, none of the conspirators ever sought or obtained a license for any of these exports,” said the US Department of Justice.
In light of the recent indictment, scepticism has grown about allowing the export of certain semiconductors to China.
“We cannot allow American innovation to fuel Beijing’s military ambitions,” read a recent social media post on X from the US House of Representatives select committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
For several years, the committee has made no secret of its concern about US technology, particularly GPUs and CPUs, falling into the hands of China.
In former president Joe Biden's administration and the current Trump administration, those calling for strict export controls have secured several victories. Technology executives from Nvidia and elsewhere say the export controls inadvertently harm efforts to boost US technology influence around the world.
“We want American technology architecture to be the global standard,” Mr Huang said in October in Washington, following his speech at the company's GTC event. “We need to be in China to win their developers.”
He emphasised Nvidia's push to be able to sell GPUs and CPUs in the country. “A policy that causes America to lose half of the world's AI developers is not beneficial long term,” he said.
Several weeks after Nvidia's GTC event, however, the White House confirmed that it would not allow China to obtain Nvidia's most powerful Blackwell chips.
In previous months, Nvidia secured smaller wins with the White House, which suggested that it would loosen restrictions on the company's less powerful H20, specifically designed for the Chinese market.
Yet various media reports suggest that China has actually blocked the import of Nvidia's H20 due to an investigation by the country's authorities about alleged “backdoor features” that would allow for the chips to be compromised.
“Nvidia GPUs do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors,” Nvidia said in August.
The H200s that Mr Trump is considering allowing Nvidia to sell to China may not be as powerful as Blackwell, but some critics say that if purchased in enough volume, it could allow China to quickly catch up to the US in the AI race.
“The H200 is better than any AI chip that China has ever been able to buy or make,” Chris McGuire, a senior fellow for emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank in Washington, wrote on X.
He added that if China's potential ability to use the H200 “would be almost as harmful to US AI leadership as approving the sale of the current-generation B30A Blackwell chips”.
In response to The National's requests for comment, an Nvidia representative reiterated the company's stance on chip export policies.
“The regulatory landscape does not allow us to offer a competitive data centre GPU in China, leaving that massive market to our rapidly growing foreign competitors,” the representative said.
