- President Trump allows China flea sales to resume – with a major warning
- AMD and NVIDIA will have to submit more than 15% of sales income
- No additional measure has been made to respond to national security threats
The US government has reversed the prohibition of the sale of the NVIDIA H20 chip and the AMD MI308 chip in China in the condition that 15% of the revenues are paid to the United States government.
The Trump administration has expanded efforts to limit China’s ability to obtain powerful fleas used to develop AI models by widening sanctions from the Biden era to a pure and simple prohibition of the sales of processors.
Many security experts, including those working under the Trump administration, have warned that the government’s sale of powerful processors to China will help it extend its military consumption and AI efforts to exceed the United States.
What happened to national security?
The NVIDIA H20 and AMD MI308 processors have been developed to comply with Biden administration restrictions on AI processing chips that could be sold in China. Restrictions have been imposed on the sale of powerful AI chips in China due to national security problems surrounding the development of AI models for the popular liberation army.
Trump prohibited the sale of these china chips following a commercial spit in April 2025, then reversed the ban in July. Now, seeing the apparent value of sales and hoping to collect, the Trump administration has a drop in revenues by 15% for itself.
Speaking to BbcNvidia said: “We follow the rules that the US government has for our participation in the world markets. Although we have not shipped H20 to China for months, we hope that the export control rules will allow America to compete in China and the world. “
It remains to be seen whether this drop in revenues of 15% will be passed on to the Chinese market by Nvidia and AMD. But the elephant in the room remains. What happened to the national security problem?
Deborah Elms, head of commercial policy at the Hinrich Foundation, “said:” You have either a national security problem or you don’t. If you have a 15%payment, this does not somehow eliminate the problem of national security. “
Despite sanctions and commercial prohibitions, China has still managed to import powerful AI treatment chips through gaps and third parties, and probably uses fleas to train AI systems to be used for military purposes.
20 security experts wrote a letter to the US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, advising flea sales on the Chinese market, adding that even if the majority of buyers are civil companies, fleas would still be used by the Chinese army.
“The optimized fleas for AI inference will not be content to feed consumer products or factory logistics; they will allow autonomous weapons systems, intelligence monitoring platforms and rapid progress in the decision -making of the battlefield,” said the letter.
Charlie Dai, vice-president and principal analyst of the global research company, Forrester, qualified the agreement as “unprecedented”, also declaring that “the arrangement underlines the high cost of market access in the midst of technological trade tensions, creating substantial financial pressure and strategic uncertainty for technological sellers.”
