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No Blackwell Chips for Beijing
Foreign Affairs
No Blackwell Chips for Beijing
The White House must continue to hold the line on not handing over American technical advantages to China.
In recent weeks, one question has occupied the minds of China-watchers and artificial intelligence insiders alike: Would the White House let Nvidia sell its most advanced Blackwell chips to China?
We finally have an answer. “The most advanced [chips], we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” said President Trump on Sunday in an interview with 60 Minutes. The clarification comes on the heels of a one‑year “trade truce” announced on November 1, under which Beijing agreed to suspend a raft of retaliations (including restrictions of rare earths) in exchange for Washington easing up on tariffs. Any concession on the export of cutting‑edge AI hardware was notably absent.
This is great news if you believe, as I do, that frontier AI systems are on the cusp of truly transformative capabilities. With the length of tasks AI can perform now doubling every 4–7 months, the same chips that are today used to host chatbots and generate funny videos will, in a year hence, be running armies of autonomous AI engineers and scientists that work day and night. Technological discovery and productivity growth stand to accelerate massively, along with the power of autonomous cyber-weapons and other capabilities we ought not sell to our adversaries.
The Blackwell chips in question are Nvidia’s next-generation datacenter accelerators. A single Blackwell B200 accelerator delivers roughly 2.5x the throughput of the prior-generation H200 for AI training, and up to 15x greater cost efficiency for inference compared to the H100. In short, the chips represent a jump into a qualitatively higher compute regime—one that Nvidia’s Chinese counterpart, Huawei, is nowhere close to replicating.
Nvidia also produces a chip tailor-made for China known as the B30A that is simply one half of their best chip, the B300. Having one rather than two integrated circuits puts the B30A under the line for export restrictions, but at half the price of the B300, Chinese firms could simply buy them two at a time. To prevent this and future such loopholes, Congress is thus considering passing the GAIN AI Act as part of this year’s National Defense Authorization—a bill establishing that U.S. companies have a right of first refusal over chips destined for China under conditions of constrained supply.
The GAIN AI Act and other efforts to fortify export controls by Congress are sorely needed. Over the coming years, geopolitical power will be increasingly well-proxied by the global distribution of AI compute. Indeed, the economies and militaries with the most powerful and widely-deployed AI systems could pull ahead rapidly. America’s continued dominance in AI is thus not only in our national interest, but potentially existential to preserving the American way of life. Our current lead is downstream of access to the world’s most advanced AI hardware and overwhelming market share in high-performance computing. But with China out-building us on new energy, we remain vulnerable to being leapfrogged but for export controls on the chips and semiconductor equipment Chinese firms need to train and deploy their models at scale.
Once best known for creating the graphics cards beloved by video gamers, Nvidia is now the overwhelming market leader in AI chip design and the surrounding software ecosystems used by developers. The geopolitics of compute has thus brought the perennial tension between U.S. national interests and corporate profit maximization into sharp relief. Nvidia is the most valuable company on earth, with a nearly $5 trillion market cap, but it could become significantly richer if given unadulterated access to the Chinese market.
To that end, Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, has been working overtime to curry favor with President Donald Trump and policymakers in Washington. Earlier this year, export restrictions on Nvidia’s China-specific H20 chip were lifted shortly after Huang purchased a dinner with the President at Mar-a-Lago. And just last week, Nvidia hosted their annual GTC conference in the nation’s capital for the first time, flooding the district with sponsorships and spin-off events that laid their new “America First”–friendly messaging on thick.
“The age of AI has begun, made in America,” declared Jensen in his keynote address, before ending the presentation with a triumphant call for “making America great again!”
Meanwhile, critics of Nvidia in DC have faced pressure to fall in line, including yours truly. After writing about the rise of China’s chip smuggling efforts, Nvidia representatives reached out to meet with me and insisted that not a single chip had been diverted, echoing a line used by Jensen himself. This is despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, from smugglers busted in the act, to warehouses of export-controlled chips conspicuously for sale on Chinese e-commerce sites. In 2023, Nvidia was even accused of attempting to sideline Gregory Allen, a prominent proponent of chip export controls at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. More recently, however, they’ve simply taken to name-calling, tarring their most vocal critics as “AI doomers,” including nationalist conservatives like Oren Cass who are anything but.
While Big Tech’s MAGA-washing is nothing new, Nvidia doth MAGA too much. In a recent interview, Jensen asserted that it “doesn’t matter” whether America or China win the AI race. This is just weeks after Jensen argued, in a moment of podcast candor, that the term “China hawk” should be worn as a “badge of shame,” causing Republican lawmakers to balk.
The signs of Nvidia’s affinity for China were always there. When all the biggest American tech CEOs were in the rotunda for Trump’s inauguration, Jensen was in Beijing. He returned to China at least two more times this year, once to meet with China’s vice premier and once with its minister of commerce. On his China visit over the summer, Jensen went so far as to tell a group of local reporters, “First I am Chinese, then I become American Chinese.” (Jensen is, in fact, Taiwanese—a distinction that still has a difference.)
Of course, globalist companies behaving in globalist ways is to be expected. The trouble only arises when such companies accrue enough power to influence public policy in ways that benefit their shareholders at the expense of core national interests. Nvidia’s concerted efforts to flip Trump on chip export controls were an attempt to do just that. Fortunately, on the latest test of Trump’s commitment to keeping America First in AI, he passed with flying colors.
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