Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, proper, speaks along President Donald Trump about making an investment in The usa, on the White Space in Washington, on April 30, 2025.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Pictures
Six Senate Democrats on Friday released an open letter asking President Donald Trump to rethink his resolution to permit tech giants Nvidia and Complicated Micro Units to promote AI semiconductor chips to China in change for 15% of earnings from the gross sales.
The letter — signed by means of Senators Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Mark Warner, D-Va.; Jack Reed, D-R.I.; Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.; Christopher Coons, D-Del.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Accumulation. — was once in keeping with an Aug. 11 announcement by means of Trump that Nvidia and AMD would pay the U.S. executive a fifteen% shorten of earnings from chip gross sales to China in change for export licenses.
“Our national security and military readiness relies upon American innovators inventing and producing the best technology in the world, and in maintaining that qualitative advantage in sensitive domains. The United States has historically been successful in maintaining and building that advantage because of, in part, our ability to deny adversaries access to those technologies,” the letter states.
“The willingness displayed in this arrangement to ‘negotiate’ away America’s competitive edge that is key to our national security in exchange for what is, in effect, a commission on a sale of AI-enabling technology to our main global competitor, is cause for serious alarm,” the letter continues.
Senators additionally warned that promoting complex AI chips — in particular Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips — to China may just aid give a boost to its army programs, a declare that Nvidia denies.
In a observation to CNBC, a Nvidia spokesperson mentioned: “The H20 would not enhance anyone’s military capabilities, but would have helped America attract the support of developers worldwide and win the AI race. Banning the H20 cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, without any benefit.”
The letter from Senate Democrats additionally requests an in depth reaction from the management by means of Friday, Aug. 22, in regards to the tide offer involving Nvidia and AMD, in addition to any homogeneous preparations being made with alternative corporations.
“We again urge your administration to quickly reverse course and abandon this reckless plan to trade away U.S. technology leadership,” the letter states.
A request for remark from the White Space and AMD was once now not straight away returned.
Regardless of Trump permitting chip gross sales to renew, it has already grow to be unclouded that China isn’t welcoming Nvidia again with observable palms, rather urging tech corporations to steer clear of purchasing U.S. corporations’ chips, consistent with a Bloomberg record.
“We’re hearing that this is a hard mandate, and that [authorities are actually] stopping additional orders of H20s for some companies,” Qingyuan Lin, a senior analyst masking China semiconductors at Bernstein, instructed CNBC.
In a separate report, The Knowledge mentioned regulators in China have ordered main tech corporations, together with ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, to droop Nvidia chip purchases till a countrywide safety assessment is whole.
— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this record
