President Trump gives the go-ahead to export Nvidia AI chips to China

The Trump administration formally gave the green light to Nvidia exports on Tuesday, allowing the tech giant to ship its artificial intelligence chips to China and other countries.

In a new rule scheduled to be announced on January 15, the Commerce Department will ease U.S. export restrictions to China on Nvidia’s H200 chips, a step President Donald Trump announced last month.

“We applaud President Trump’s decision to allow the U.S. chip industry to compete to support America’s high-wage jobs and manufacturing,” an Nvidia spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement. “Offering the H200 to commercial customers, vetted and approved by the Department of Commerce, strikes a great balance for the United States.”

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The tech company continued: “The administration’s critics are inadvertently promoting the interests of foreign competitors on the U.S. Entity List. America should always want its industry to compete for vetted and approved commercial business and support real jobs for real Americans.”

The rule outlines that the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security will revise its license review policy for certain semiconductor exports to China from a presumption of denial to a case-by-case review, partially reversing Biden-era restrictions on high-end chip exports.

President Trump announced last month that he would allow the sale of chips in exchange for paying a 25% fee to the U.S. government and said he would closely monitor the transactions to protect national security.

“I told President Xi of China that the United States will allow Nvidia to ship H200 products to authorized customers in China and other countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong national security,” Trump said in a December post on Truth Social.

Nvidia’s H200 chip is a high-performance processor that helps run AI programs such as chatbots, machine learning, and data center tasks.

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According to regulations, the chips must undergo third-party testing in the US to confirm AI performance and functionality, and China will not be allowed to receive more than 50% of the total amount of chips sold in the US.

Nvidia will need to prove there is an adequate supply of chips in the United States, and China will also need to prove adequate security procedures.

China’s use of the chips for military purposes will be prohibited.

Reuters reported last month that the Chinese technology company had ordered more than 2 million H200 chips (about $27,000 each), far exceeding Nvidia’s current inventory of about 700,000 chips.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week that the company is ramping up chip production due to strong global demand, including in China, and chip rental prices in cloud computing data centers are rising.

President Trump has previously criticized the Biden administration’s rules restricting exports of advanced AI chips and semiconductors to China, citing national security concerns.

These restrictions were primarily targeted at Nvidia’s previous generation of high-end chips as part of an effort to prevent China from gaining a technological advantage.

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Last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York accused President Trump of “selling America short” after the U.S. announced plans to allow Nvidia to export chips to China and other countries.

FOX Business’ Bonny Chu and Reuters contributed to this report.