Chip Giants NVIDIA and AMD agreed to pay 15%of China’s imports to the US government as part of an unprecedented transaction to secure export licenses in China.
The United States generally banned powerful chips used in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) under export control related to national security issues.
Security experts, including Donald Trump’s first term, recently wrote a letter to the executive that NVIDIA’s H20 chip expressed his “deep interest” of “powerful accelerator” of China’s AI function.
NVIDIA told the BBC: “We follow the rules of the US government to participate in the global market.”
“We haven’t shipped H20 to China for several months, but I hope export control rules can compete in China and around the world.”
AMD did not immediately respond to the request. The White House refused to comment.
Under this agreement, NVIDIA will pay 15%of sales to the US government in China’s H20 chip sales.
AMD will also provide 15%of sales generated by the Trump administration in China’s MI308 chip sales, which was first reported by the Financial Times.
The H20 chip was particularly developed for the Chinese market after the US export restriction was imposed by the BIDEN administration in 2023.
Sales of chips were effectively banned by the Trump government in April this year.
Beijing previously criticized the US government and accused “abusing export control measures and involved in unilateral harassment.”
NVIDIA’s chief executive Jensen Huang spent several months lobbying both sides to resume the Chinese chip sales. He met with US President Donald Trump last week.
Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at HINRICH FOUNDATION, said, “There is a national security problem.
“If you pay 15%, you will not eliminate national security problems anyway,” she added.
In Beijing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said:
In a letter to the US Minister of Commerce Lutnick last month, 20 security experts said that the largest buyer of NVIDIA’s H20 chip was a private company in China, but expects the military to use it.
“The chip optimized for AI reasoning will enable the rapid development of autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms and battlefield decisions, not just power consumer products or factory logistics.”
NVIDIA said in a statement about the BBC: “The United States cannot repeat 5G repeated and can not lose communication leadership. The US AI technology stack can be the world’s standard if we race.”
Charlie Dai, vice president and chief analyst of Forrester, a global research firm, said that the contract to hand over 15% of China’s chip sales instead of export license to the US government is “unprecedented.”
“The contract emphasizes the high cost of market access while increasing the tension of technology trade and creating significant financial pressure and strategic uncertainty for technology suppliers.”
As the trade tension between Beijing and Washington is relaxed, chip sales resumes to China.
Beijing has been relaxing to export rare earths, and the United States has lifted its restrictions on chip design software companies operating in China.
In May, the two largest economies in the world agreed to the 90 -day truce in the tariff war.
Since then, the agreement to extend the tariff has not yet been confirmed before the deadline on August 12, but the top trade officials on both sides have met several times.
Trump put pressure on major companies to invest more in the United States as part of his trade policy.
Last week, Apple said it would invest another $ 100 billion (£ 74.4 billion) in this country to add a previous pledge to spend $ 500 billion in the United States over the next four years.
Micron Technology, a memory chip manufacturer in June, said the planned US investment will total $ 200 billion. This includes the construction of a new manufacturing facility in Aida.
NVIDIA itself announced plans to build up to $ 50 billion in AI servers in the United States and promised to build the first AI supercomputer in the United States.
The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, reported that Intel’s supervisor would meet Trump at the White House after the president demanded an immediate resignation in relation to China.
Last week, Trump said in social media that Lip-Bu Tan was “very conflicting.”
TAN pushed back, saying “wrong information.”
