Technology Industry President Trump stands out from the surprising new deal with NVIDIA. Trump said earlier this week that he would allow the company to continue selling its H20 chips to China in exchange for 15% of its revenue.
“H20 is outdated. You know, it’s one of them, but there’s still a market,” Trump said in a press conference on Monday. “So we negotiated some deals.”
The unusual and legal suspicious arrangement is a surprising reversal of the Trump administration, which banned all H20 sales to China earlier this year. The president reportedly changed his mind after meeting with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
On the one hand, it’s a simple story about a president who seems to be influenced by a powerful lobbying of the interests of the company. But under the surface, the legendary story about how we get here is even more interesting and complex.
NVIDIA launched the H20 last year after the U.S. government banned the company from selling its more powerful chip (H800) to China. The move is part of an ambitious project planned by Biden administration officials who believe the United States needs to first develop China’s advanced artificial intelligence.
Over the past few months, I have worked closely with Stanford researcher Graham Webster, who is trying to understand how the Biden team decides first that the United States needs to curb China’s access to advanced semiconductors. Today, Wired is based on interviews with more than 10 U.S. officials and policy experts, publishing Graham’s authoritative account of what actually happened behind the scenes, some of whom spoke anonymously.
“I did this because the official legal basis for control, military and human rights was obviously never the whole story,” Graham told me. “Obviously, AI was involved, and I wanted to understand why I had to go deeper.”
Graham wrote that several major officials at Biden’s White House and Business Department “believed that AI is approaching a turning point (or several) that could bring a country’s major military and economic advantage. Some believe that self-improvement systems or so-called artificial general intelligence may be technically a technical perspective.
Therefore, the Biden team decided to take action. In the fall of 2022, they announced extensive export controls aimed at preventing China from accessing state-of-the-art chips needed to train powerful AI systems, as well as Beijing’s professional equipment to modernize its own domestic pastry industry.
The move is the beginning of a multi-year project that “will reshape the relationship between the world’s two largest powers and transform one of the technologies that generations might be the last fruit,” Graham wrote.
What shocked me is Graham’s story of how many people have been involved in Biden’s export control policies, shifting to other influential positions in the world of artificial intelligence, computing and national security. Jason Matheny, who leads the White House technology and national security policy, is now the president and CEO of Rand, a well-known think tank that often serves government clients. Tarun Chhabra, who once worked for the National Security Council, now leads the national security policy of mankind.
