Nvidia and AMD agree to pay US government 15% of China chip revenue for export licences

Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15% of revenue from sales of specific AI chips to China — Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 — in exchange for export licences the companies needed to resume those sales, according to reporting confirmed by both companies. The arrangement followed the Trump administration’s decision to reverse an April 2025 ban on H20 exports, a reversal that came two days after Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang met with President Trump at the White House; AMD’s China-bound exports were approved around the same time.

The deal was reported as the first instance of a US company agreeing to share export revenue directly with the government as a condition of a national-security-related licence, rather than the licence being granted or refused outright. Trump described the H20, a chip Nvidia had designed specifically to comply with earlier China export limits, as “old” and “obsolete” technology whose sale posed little strategic risk, framing the payment as fair compensation for an exemption. Trade lawyers and former officials raised concerns about the precedent: linking export licensing, historically a national-security instrument, to a direct payment to the Treasury blurred a line policymakers had previously kept distinct, and critics on both the restrictionist and free-trade sides objected for different reasons — one group that any China sales undermined the policy’s purpose, the other that a pay-to-export scheme resembled an informal tariff with no statutory basis.

For Nvidia and AMD, the deal restored access to a market each had said cost it significant revenue under the ban; AMD had reported the China curbs erasing MI308 sales and contributing to an operating loss in its data-centre unit. For the broader China-and-controls fight, it marked a shift from the binary export bans of 2022–2024 toward a negotiated, revenue-sharing model of controlled access.