National Security Experts Urge Trump Administration to Reconsider Nvidia H20 Chip Exports to China

Trump caving on Nvidia H20 export curbs may disrupt his bigger trade war

The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs -- which could come by next month -- but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security. In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China. In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US. In their letter, national security experts expressed "deep concern" that Trump may not have considered how Nvidia's H20 chips could endanger the US military's "edge in artificial intelligence" while serving as a "potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities." While these chips can't be used for AI training like the Blackwell and H100 chips still restricted by export curbs, they're "optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models," experts warned. Most likely, China will use the chips for AI models deployed by its military to "enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms, and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making," experts said. In that way, "by supplying China with these chips, we are fueling the very infrastructure that will be used to modernize and expand the Chinese military," they warned. The Trump administration is notably investigating how chip tariffs and imports could harm national security, with a report due out in two weeks, Lutnick announced today. That report will supposedly help Trump determine if relying too much on other countries for chips poses a national security threat.

20 national security experts urge Trump administration to restrict Nvidia H20 sales to China | TechCrunch

Not everyone is happy that the Trump administration gave Nvidia the green light to start selling its H20 advanced AI chips in China again. A group of 20 national security experts and former government officials wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday urging the Trump administration to reverse its recent decision to let Nvidia resume selling its H20 AI chips in China. The letter called the Trump administration's recent decision a "strategic misstep" that will have detrimental effects on the U.S.'s AI "edge" for both military and civilian use cases. The letter specifically called out H20's AI inference, the process of using a trained AI model to make decisions on unseen data. "The H20 is a potent accelerator of China's frontier AI capabilities, not an outdated AI chip," the letter stated. "Designed specifically to work around export control thresholds, the H20 is optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models. For inference tasks, the H20 outperforms even the H100, an AI chip this administration has restricted access to due to its advanced capabilities." The letter also claimed that selling the H20 chips in China will worsen the existing AI chip bottleneck in the U.S.; that these chips could be used to support China's military; and that this decision will weaken overall chip export controls. "The decision to ban H20 exports earlier this year was the right one," the letter said. "We ask you to stand by that principle and continue blocking the sale of advanced AI chips to China as America works to maintain its technological edge. This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security. The letter's signatories include Matt Pottinger, the former deputy national security adviser during Trump's first term; Stewart Baker, the former assistant secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush; and David Feith, a former member of the National Security Council, among others. This letter comes two weeks after the DOC gave Nvidia the green light to start selling its AI chips in China again in relation to ongoing trade discussions with China regarding rare earth elements. At the time, Lutnick tried to downplay the decision and said Nvidia's H20 was the company's "fourth best" AI chip. Last week, the Trump administration unveiled its AI Action Plan, which highlighted the need for U.S. AI chip export restrictions but was light on the details of what those export controls would look like.