Trump administration approves Nvidia H200 chip exports to China
The 25% government cut was up from a 15% arrangement applied earlier to H20 sales; Nvidia's newer Blackwell chips remained excluded, and Democratic lawmakers demanded disclosure of the licensing review.
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President Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States would allow Nvidia to export its H200 AI chips to approved customers in China, in exchange for the US government taking a 25% cut of the sales revenue. He said he had informed Chinese President Xi Jinping of the decision and that Xi had responded favourably, and that he intended to apply “the same approach” to AMD, Intel and other American chipmakers.
The 25% figure marked an increase from an earlier revenue-sharing arrangement, reported at 15%, that had applied to sales of Nvidia’s more restricted H20 chip to China. Nvidia’s newest and most capable chip, Blackwell, was explicitly excluded from the new arrangement, meaning China would still be limited to a generation-behind product. The decision reversed the direction of US policy on AI chip exports to China, which had tightened steadily since 2022 under both the Biden and early Trump administrations on the grounds that advanced chips could accelerate Chinese military and AI capability.
The move drew immediate criticism from Democratic lawmakers. The Justice Department had, hours before Trump’s announcement, disclosed it had broken up a Chinese smuggling network it said was “funneling cutting-edge AI technology” to parties that could use it against US interests, and Democrats argued that description sat uneasily with a same-day decision to legalise a related class of exports. Senator Elizabeth Warren and others raised concerns that Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang had lobbied for the change and questioned whether it prioritised short-term revenue over the military-application risks the Justice Department itself had just flagged; some Republicans countered that supplying China with a second-tier chip made it more dependent on US suppliers rather than pursuing self-sufficiency. Lawmakers subsequently sought disclosure of the licensing review’s details.
The decision extended a broader pattern of the Trump administration using revenue-sharing arrangements, rather than blanket bans, to manage chip exports to China — a policy that critics said blurred national-security controls with fiscal considerations.