From Bloomberg, December 9:
President Donald Trump decided to let Nvidia Corp. sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China after concluding the move carried a lower security risk because the company’s Chinese archrival, Huawei Technologies Co., already offers AI systems with comparable performance, according to a person familiar with the deliberations.
Administration officials who weighed whether to clear Nvidia’s H200 had considered multiple possible scenarios, factoring in the views of national security hawks in Washington, said the person. Options ranged from exporting zero AI chips to China to allowing exports of everything to flood the Chinese market and overwhelm Huawei. Ultimately the policy backed by Trump called for clearing H200s to China while holding back the latest Nvidia chips for American customers, the person said.
The move would give the US an 18-month advantage over China in terms of what AI chips customers in each market receive, with American buyers retaining exclusive access to the latest products, the person said. White House officials concluded that pushing the H200 into China would prod Chinese AI developers into building on the US tech ecosystem rather than turning to offerings from Huawei or other local chipmakers.
Trump’s decision capped weeks of deliberations with advisers about whether to allow H200 exports to China and came days after a private meeting in Washington with Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who has pressed for relief from US export controls. In his Truth social post announcing the move, Trump said that shipments would only go to “approved customers,” and that chipmakers such as Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. would also qualify.
Underpinning the move was an assessment that Huawei can compete far more closely with Nvidia than the US has acknowledged. White House officials focused on a Huawei AI platform known as CloudMatrix 384 that relies on the company’s newer Ascend chips, the person said. Officials found that CloudMatrix 384 performed as well as a similar Nvidia system known as NVL72 that uses the US company’s most-advanced Blackwell-design chips, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
Adding a sense of urgency, the person said, was a conclusion by US officials that Huawei would be capable in 2026 of producing a few million of its Ascend 910C accelerators, a chip designed specifically to compete with Nvidia’s product line. That compares with a US estimate, given in June, that the Shenzhen-based company would be able to make just 200,000 of the Ascend line this year....
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