Exporting large numbers of the chips to China would be “a significant strategic mistake”, said Chris McGuire, a former White House National Security Council official under President Joe Biden and senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations.
McGuire described the chips as “the one thing holding China back in AI”.
“I cannot possibly fathom how the departments of Commerce, State, Energy, and Defense could certify that exporting these chips to China is in the US national security interest,” he said.
Led by White House AI czar David Sacks, several members of the Trump administration now argue that shipping advanced AI chips to China discourages Chinese competitors like Huawei from redoubling efforts to catch up with Nvidia’s and AMD’s most-advanced chip designs.
Reuters reported last week that Nvidia was considering an increase in production of the H200, the immediate predecessor to its current flagship Blackwell chips, after initial orders from China outstripped the current capacity.
While the H200 chips are slower than Nvidia’s Blackwell chips at many AI tasks, they remain in wide use in the industry and have never been allowed for sale in China.
Trump had previously opened the door to sales of a less-advanced version of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, its cutting-edge offering, but backed away from the move and approved sales of the H200 instead.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/world/us-review-advanced-nvidia-ai-chip-sales-china-5639666
