US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell artificial intelligence chip would not be available to “other people”, Reuters reported.
Nvidia dominates the AI chip market and recently reached a market cap of $5 trillion.
Questions have been raised since August about whether Trump would allow Blackwell chips to be shipped to China, when he indicated he would allow a scaled-down version of Nvidia’s next-generation advanced GPU chip into Beijing.
Trump’s latest statement to reporters aboard Air Force One suggests his administration’s reluctance to grant broad overseas access to the valuable chip.
“The new Blackwell that just came out is 10 years ahead of every other chip,” the report quoted Trump, who was on his way to Washington after a weekend in Florida, as saying. “But no, we don’t give that chip to other people,” he said.
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The potential sale of Blackwell’s chips to Chinese companies has faced criticism from China hawks in Washington, who fear the technology could greatly boost China’s military power and accelerate its progress in artificial intelligence.
Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, who heads the House Select Committee on China, said selling Blackwell chips to China would be akin to supplying Iran with weapons-grade uranium.
Trump suggested he might discuss the chips with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of their summit in South Korea last week, but the topic ultimately did not come up.
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Selling less advanced Nvidia chips to China
Earlier, Trump said he would consider a deal that would allow Nvidia to send its Blackwell chips to China if the company could mitigate them. “It’s possible that I could settle” on a “somewhat improved – in a negative sense – Blackwell” processor, he said. “In other words, take 30 to 50 percent off of it.”
Jensen Huang on sales in China
Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the chip giant did not pursue US export licenses for the Chinese market because of Beijing’s stance on the company.
“They’ve made it clear they don’t want Nvidia to be there right now,” he said at the event, going on to mention that it needs access to China to fund research and development in the US.
Meanwhile, Nvidia announced on Friday that it will ship more than 260,000 Blackwell AI chips to South Korea and several of the country’s largest businesses, including Samsung Electronics.
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How will Blackwell chip exports affect the US?
Exporting these chips will have a direct impact on US AI dominance over China. If Washington allows the export of B30A (Blackwell) and similar chips from other US companies, China could surpass the US in AI computing power by 2026, the news agency said, citing experts.
However, if no powerful chips are exported to China next year, the US will have 30 times the AI computing power of China.
Amid concerns about US exports, Chinese regulators have pushed for increased use of domestic chips. However, leading tech firms such as Alibaba and ByteDance have argued that their AI development would decline without Nvidia chips, jeopardizing China’s competitiveness in the technology race with the US.
Key things
- The Trump administration is focused on curbing the export of advanced AI chips to China to maintain the US’s technological superiority.
- The potential sale of Blackwell chips to China is raising significant national security concerns among US lawmakers.
- Chinese tech firms fear that without access to Nvidia’s chips, their AI development could stagnate.
