The US President Donald Trump administration’s decision allowing Nvidia Corp to resume shipments of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China risks bolstering Beijing’s military capabilities and expanding its capacity to compete with the US, the head of the US House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party said.
“The H20, which is a cost-effective and powerful AI inference chip, far surpasses China’s indigenous capability and would therefore provide a substantial increase to China’s AI development,” committee chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said on Friday in a letter to US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees semiconductor export controls. “We must not allow US companies to sell these vital artificial intelligence assets to Chinese entities.”
Moolenaar’s letter follows indications from the US that it would allow certain types of AI processors from Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc back into China after restricting sales of those less-advanced components in April. Lutnick and other officials justified the step by saying that Chinese companies could already get parts that are equivalent to or better than Nvidia’s H20 — a scaled-down accelerator designed to abide by earlier US restrictions on leading-edge chips.
Photo: AFP
Washington has yet to formally approve any H20 shipments, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said on Wednesday, but the company expects those licenses soon.
It is still unclear what volume of sales the US plans to allow. Some Trump officials have privately protested the decision to permit any such exports.
Moolenaar requested a briefing from the commerce department by Aug. 8 to explain the rationale for the policy change. He also sought clarity on how the US would issue licenses for the H20 and how many chips would ultimately be cleared for shipment to China.
“Approving the sale of large volumes of H20s could give China the compute power it needs to develop powerful AI models that are open to users free of charge as DeepSeek (深度求索) has done with R1,” Moolenaar said. “As China has done in so many other industries, this is a deliberate strategy to capture market share and become the global standard.”
Trump officials including US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent have cast the policy shift on the H20 as part of an effort to secure access to rare earth minerals from China, a core US aim in ongoing trade negotiations, despite earlier assertions that allowing H20 exports was not up for discussion in those talks.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday said the US should abandon its “zero-sum mindset” and scrap its “unjustified” trade restrictions when commenting on Washington lifting the H20 chips restrictions.
The US effectively banned sales of advanced chips to China in 2022 and has several times tightened those controls, which also cover chip manufacturing equipment and target specific Chinese companies. Nvidia is not allowed to ship to China its most advanced AI processors, which account for about 90 percent of that market.
The H20 is widely sought after in China, in large part due to its memory bandwidth, which makes it particularly good for inference: the point at which AI models recognize patterns and draw conclusions.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
A proposed 100 percent tariff on chip imports announced by US President Donald Trump could shift more of Taiwan’s semiconductor production overseas, a Taiwan Institute of Economic Research (TIER) researcher said yesterday. Trump’s tariff policy will accelerate the global semiconductor industry’s pace to establish roots in the US, leading to higher supply chain costs and ultimately raising prices of consumer electronics and creating uncertainty for future market demand, Arisa Liu (劉佩真) at the institute’s Taiwan Industry Economics Database said in a telephone interview. Trump’s move signals his intention to "restore the glory of the US semiconductor industry," Liu noted, saying that
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
STILL UNCLEAR: Several aspects of the policy still need to be clarified, such as whether the exemptions would expand to related products, PwC Taiwan warned The TAIEX surged yesterday, led by gains in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), after US President Donald Trump announced a sweeping 100 percent tariff on imported semiconductors — while exempting companies operating or building plants in the US, which includes TSMC. The benchmark index jumped 556.41 points, or 2.37 percent, to close at 24,003.77, breaching the 24,000-point level and hitting its highest close this year, Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) data showed. TSMC rose NT$55, or 4.89 percent, to close at a record NT$1,180, as the company is already investing heavily in a multibillion-dollar plant in Arizona that led investors to assume
RSS