Trump Approved a Nvidia Chip for Sale in China. Beijing Doesn’t Want It.
The U.S. tech giant’s powerful H200 chip seemed poised to boost Beijing’s A.I. ambitions, but not a single one has been purchased in China.
The U.S. tech giant’s powerful H200 chip seemed poised to boost Beijing’s A.I. ambitions, but not a single one has been purchased in China.
When President Trump announced late last year that Nvidia could sell one of its most powerful chips to China, the deal looked like a rare win-win in a fraying geopolitical relationship. It would provide a major boost for China’s artificial intelligence ambitions, while handing a win to America’s leading chipmaker.
Cutting-edge A.I. systems run on staggering amounts of computing power, and Nvidia’s chips are considered the gold standard worldwide. Chinese competitors have yet to build anything that rivals Nvidia’s best, and Mr. Trump’s decision undercut years of U.S. policy designed to keep those chips out of China’s reach.
Former Biden and Trump administration officials warned the move could squander the lead that American A.I. companies held over Chinese rivals, by helping China close the gap until its own chipmakers could catch up to Nvidia.
But six months on, Beijing has not allowed any of its companies to buy a single one.
The impasse lays bare the depth of the mistrust between the world’s technological superpowers. For decades, U.S. and Chinese companies worked side by side to create products like the iPhone that upended industries. But the relationship has soured over the past decade as both governments came to see technology as the fulcrum of economic supremacy.
Nvidia is trapped in the middle. The chipmaker became the world’s most valuable company by making its semiconductors indispensable to running A.I. systems. But Washington and Beijing increasingly view that technology as a matter of national security, especially after watching how it has been used to coordinate attacks in Gaza, Ukraine, Venezuela and Iran.
Rather than turn to Nvidia, Chinese officials have pushed domestic companies toward homegrown alternatives from chipmakers like Huawei and Cambricon. After meeting last week in Beijing with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, Mr. Trump said that China’s lack of interest in the chip he had approved, known as the H200, had been driven in part by this push for industrial self-reliance.
