(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing whether to allow Nvidia to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview to Bloomberg News on Monday. The president is consulting “lots of different advisers” in deciding on the potential exports, the report quoted Lutnick as saying. The decision to […]
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Trump weighing advanced Nvidia chip sales to China, Bloomberg News reports
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(Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump is weighing whether to allow Nvidia to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview to Bloomberg News on Monday.
The president is consulting “lots of different advisers” in deciding on the potential exports, the report quoted Lutnick as saying. The decision to authorize sales of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China is on Trump’s desk, according to the report.
This comes after media reports on Friday detailing early discussions among U.S. officials regarding the sale of the H200 chips to China. The H200 chips, unveiled two years ago, have more high-bandwidth memory than its predecessor H100, allowing them to process data more quickly.
The potential easing of export restrictions signals a softer stance toward China, following a trade and tech truce brokered by Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Busan last month.
An Nvidia spokesperson said current regulations prevent the company from providing a competitive data center GPU in China, allowing foreign competitors to gain a significant foothold in that large market.
The White House did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
China has remained an overhang for Nvidia due to the export restrictions, first imposed in 2022 to make sure Beijing’s military would not benefit from American technology. That has prompted the company to turn to the Middle East as a new growth avenue.
The Commerce Department announced last week it had approved shipments of the equivalent of up to 70,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips, the company’s next-generation AI chip, to Saudi Arabia’s Humain and G42 of the United Arab Emirates.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had said earlier this month there were “no active discussions” on selling Blackwell chips to China despite speculation of a possible deal for a scaled-down version.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)