Trump Clears Nvidia to Sell Powerful AI Chips to China, Signaling Potential Billion-Dollar Windfall

Donald Trump has removed restrictions, paving the way for Nvidia to resume selling its powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China — a move seen as a major win for the chipmaker and its CEO, Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to reopen sales to the Chinese market.

Before Monday’s announcement, the United States had banned Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips to China, citing national security concerns.

“I have informed President Xi of China that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China and other countries, under conditions that ensure continued strong national security,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday. “President Xi responded positively!”

Trump said the Department of Commerce is finalizing the details and added that he plans to extend the same arrangement to other chipmakers, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. Nvidia’s H200 chips are the company’s second-most powerful products and are significantly more advanced than the H20 chips, which were designed as lower-powered versions specifically for the Chinese market to comply with export restrictions, but which the U.S. nevertheless banned in April.

The president stated that the United States would receive 25% of the proceeds from the sales — higher than the 15% previously agreed upon with Nvidia in an earlier deal to ease restrictions. This follows other unconventional proposals to give the federal government a direct financial stake in private companies. In August, Trump said the U.S. would receive a 10% stake in Intel, a move that some lawmakers have questioned on legal grounds.

According to The Hill, Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Andy Kim of New Jersey sent a letter last week to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, expressing concerns that selling these chips to China could fuel the country’s “surveillance, censorship, and military applications.”

“I urge you to stop ignoring the views of bipartisan members of Congress and your own experts in order to pursue deals that trade away America’s national security,” the senators wrote.

On social media, Warren called for Jensen Huang to appear before Congress to testify under oath.

Huang has worked closely with Trump since his inauguration and has made multiple trips to the White House. The Nvidia CEO attended Trump’s AI summit in July, met with the president as recently as last week, and was even a guest at a White House dinner attended by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Huang has also pledged to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the United States over the next four years.

Huang has visited China several times as well, meeting with government officials and Chinese technology executives during periods when U.S. bans were both lifted and reinstated. Earlier this year, China imposed its own restrictions on Nvidia chip imports, with reports indicating that leading tech firms were instructed to cancel orders, citing national security concerns and growing confidence in China’s domestic chip industry.

In October, Huang said Nvidia’s share of the Chinese market had fallen from 95% to zero, calling the export bans a “strategic mistake.”

Now, renewed access to the Chinese market — the world’s second-largest economy — could generate billions of dollars in revenue for Nvidia, which is already valued at $4.5 trillion.

“We applaud President Trump’s decision,” a Nvidia spokesperson said, adding that offering H200 chips “to approved commercial customers vetted by the Department of Commerce strikes a thoughtful balance that benefits America.”

Both Nvidia and Trump said the move would support U.S. jobs and manufacturing. In his Truth Social post, Trump criticized the export-control policies of the Biden administration, which had imposed strict limits on sales of advanced chips. The Biden administration argued that denying China access to such technology strengthened U.S. competitiveness, protected national security, and slowed AI development in China.

“That era is over!” Trump wrote. “My administration will always put America first.”

Chinese authorities had not yet responded to the announcement. Ma Jihua, a telecommunications industry analyst, told state-run Global Times that years of U.S. curbs on AI exports had “provided a rare opportunity for China’s domestic chip industry to grow and catch up.”