(January 14): The Trump administration has issued revised standards for U.S. government approval to ship processors to Chinese buyers, moving Nvidia closer to permission to sell its H200 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China.
Under regulations announced Tuesday, the Commerce Department said it would review applications to export AI chips to China on a case-by-case basis, easing the U.S.’s previous stance of denying sales license applications to customers in Asian countries.
The measure establishes licensing requirements for Nvidia and AI chip manufacturing rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which is seeking permission to sell its MI325X chips in China. The conditions include proving there is no shortage of processors in the United States. Companies seeking export approval will need to prove that production for Chinese customers will not displace manufacturing capacity that could be used to produce chips for domestic buyers.
Both companies are limited in the number of chips they can ship to China, which limits them to no more than 50% of the total products manufactured for the U.S. market. The rules, overseen by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, also require companies to employ “rigorous customer knowledge” procedures to prevent unauthorized use of the technology.
The chips will also be required to undergo third-party testing in the United States.
“We comply with all U.S. export control laws and policies,” an AMD spokesperson said in a statement. NVIDIA had no immediate comment.
The regulation is an important step toward implementing U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision last month to allow Nvidia and other chipmakers to sell advanced AI processors to China. This represents a significant shift from the policy imposed starting in 2022 to prevent the Chinese government and its military from accessing the United States’ most powerful technologies.
Introduced more than two years ago, the H200 will be the most advanced AI chip to be legally exported to customers in China. Nvidia sells a more advanced Blackwell generation in the United States and is preparing to transition to an even faster family of chips named after astronomer Vera Rubin.
