The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, delivered the opening speech at the annual conference of Nvidia GTC in San Jose, California. Last month.
Justin Sullivan / Getty images
hide
tilting legend
Justin Sullivan / Getty images
When the CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, attended a dinner of $ 1 million in Mar-A-Lago last week, a chip known as H20 was perhaps in his mind.
Indeed, the initiates of the flea industry were largely expected that the Trump administration impose borders at the H20, the American companies of the most sharp AI can be legally sold to China, a crucial market to one of the most precious companies in the world.
After the Mar-A-Lago dinner, the White House reversed the course on the H20 fleas, arousing the plan from additional restrictions, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan which were not allowed to speak publicly.
The American export controls planned for the H20 have been underway for months, according to the two sources, and were ready to be implemented this week.
The change of course compared to the White House came after Nvidia promised the Trump administration of new American investments in AI data centers, according to one of the sources.
American legislators have been pressure on Trump administration for weeks to place more stringent borders on advanced technology linked to artificial intelligence. In February, meaning. Elizabeth Warren, D-MASS., And Josh Hawley, R-MO., In addition to export controls on the H20 chip after the Chinese technology company Deepseek unveiled a catbot Breakthrough AI which amazed the world in January.
The Trump administration’s decision to allow Chinese companies to continue buying H20 fleas is a major victory for the country, said Chris Miller, a history professor at Tufts University and semiconductor expert.
“Even if these chips are specifically modified to reduce their performance, which makes them legal for sale in China – they are better than many, perhaps most, local china tokens,” said Miller. “China still cannot produce the volume of tokens it needs at the national level, so it criticizes imports on imports from Nvidia chips.”
The White House and the Commerce Department have not returned requests for comments. A spokesperson for Nvidia refused to comment.
It is not clear if Huang spoke directly to Trump during the Friday event, but two sources say that until then, the hypothesis had been that the Washington trade war with China would soon include tight controls on the H20 chip – which were among the chips used by Deepseek.
Since 2022, American regulators have restricted semiconductor tokens that Nvidia can sell to China for fear that Beijing can exploit American technology to strengthen its capacities of AI and military. The H20 appeared under these constraints, becoming the most powerful AI chip he could export to China under the law.
This year, the H20 chip has become more and more coveted by artificial intelligence companies, because it is designed to support inference, a calculation process used to support models of AI like China Deepseek and other AI agents developed by Meta and Openai.
Consequently, the H20 had appeared as if they would also be subject to a Trump administration interruption. And technological companies in China have responded. In the first three months of the year, the main Chinese technology companies bought $ 16 billion in H20 chips, the information reported last week, storing the components in anticipation, there would soon be American export checks on the chip.
Despite the political pressure to expand American export controls to cover the H20 chip, the regulatory process has encountered delays, partly due to a lack of personnel and safety office (BIS), the office of the Commerce Department responsible for the design and application of such controls, according to a third person familiar with the agency’s operations which were not authorized to speak publicly.
The bis was hampered by the federal cuts and the reshuffle under the Trump administration. Matthew Boreman, the most high -end expert in the country’s export country, has left the BIS this year as part of an exodus in February of senior agencies.
President Trump has also evolved quickly to dismantle and reorganize the technological policies implemented by the Biden administration, in particular the Chips Act, which authorized $ 39 billion in companies to invest in semiconductor supply chains in the United States
Last month, Trump ordered the creation of a new investment office “Accelerator” which will take over a large part of the investment work portfolio to semiconductors of the licensed Acts Acts Act from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a federal agency struck by federal restructuring efforts.
