White House AI adviser David Sacks on Tuesday defended the decision by the administration of US President Donald Trump to allow Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc to resume sales of some artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, reversing export curbs imposed by the US earlier this year.
Allowing Nvidia to restart shipments of its H20 chips would position the US to compete more effectively abroad and blunt efforts by Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies Co (華為) to gain a bigger slice of the global market, Sacks said in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
“We are not selling the latest and greatest chips to China, but we can deprive Huawei of having this giant market share in China that they can then use to scale up and compete globally,” he said. “The policy is nuanced and it makes a lot of sense.“
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The move is seen as a win for Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), who last week met with Trump after spending months arguing for a letup in US restrictions on sales to Chinese customers.
“Jensen has been making the case publicly for competing in China and there are a lot of merits to the argument,” Sacks said.
Revived sales of the H20 promise to restore billions in revenue for Nvidia this year, according to the company.
The H20 was originally designed to comply with export controls imposed under the administration of former US president Joe Biden, but in April, the Trump administration tightened those rules to block sales to China of the H20 and AMD’s MI308 chip without a license.
The tighter curbs prompted Nvidia to announce a US$4.5 billion writedown on H20 chip inventory in its fiscal first quarter and warn of an additional potential loss of US$8 billion in sales.
AMD said it would take an US$800 million charge for its second quarter of this year.
Sacks pushed back on criticism that allowing H20 sales to China poses a security risk, calling the H20 “a deprecated chip.”
He warned that other countries are choosing between US and Chinese technology.
“If you don’t let these countries buy American tech, you’re pushing them into China’s arms,” he said.
Trump officials had previously said that the H20 chip sales curbs were not up for negotiation.
Sacks said that the policy shift fits into what he described as a broader push to establish an “American AI stack” — encompassing chips, operating systems and the AI models that run on them.
“It’s a zero-sum game,” he said. “We want it all to be American-made and American-powered. If we hobble our own companies, we’re handing an advantage to China.”
The reversal follows months of diplomacy between Washington and Beijing. As part of a trade truce unveiled last month, the US has eased some restrictions on exports, including chip-design software, in exchange for greater Chinese cooperation on sales of rare earth minerals — a key input for many high-tech products.
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