Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, proper, speaks alongside President Donald Trump about investing in America, on the White Home in Washington, on April 30, 2025.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Photos
Six Senate Democrats on Friday launched an open letter asking President Donald Trump to rethink his determination to permit tech giants Nvidia and Superior Micro Gadgets to promote AI semiconductor chips to China in alternate for 15% of income from the gross sales.
The letter — signed by 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-Mass. — was in response to an Aug. 11 announcement by Trump that Nvidia and AMD would pay the U.S. authorities a 15% lower of income from chip gross sales to China in alternate for export licenses.
“Our nationwide safety and army readiness depends upon American innovators inventing and producing one of the best expertise on the planet, and in sustaining that qualitative benefit in delicate domains. The US has traditionally been profitable in sustaining and constructing that benefit due to, partially, our means to disclaim adversaries entry to these applied sciences,” the letter states.
“The willingness displayed on this association to ‘negotiate’ away America’s aggressive edge that’s key to our nationwide safety in alternate for what’s, in impact, a fee on a sale of AI-enabling expertise to our primary world competitor, is trigger for critical alarm,” the letter continues.
Senators additionally warned that promoting superior AI chips — particularly Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips — to China may assist strengthen its army methods, a declare that Nvidia denies.
In an announcement to CNBC, a Nvidia spokesperson stated: “The H20 wouldn’t improve anybody’s army capabilities, however would have helped America entice the assist of builders worldwide and win the AI race. Banning the H20 price American taxpayers billions of {dollars}, with none profit.”
A request for touch upon the letter from AMD was not instantly returned.
The Senate Democrats additionally requested an in depth response from the administration by Friday, Aug. 22, concerning the present deal involving Nvidia and AMD, in addition to any comparable preparations being made with different firms.
“We once more urge your administration to rapidly reverse course and abandon this reckless plan to commerce away U.S. expertise management,” the letter states.
In response, the Trump administration appeared to brush apart the legislators’ nationwide safety issues.
“It is fairly wealthy to see Democrats and irrelevant ‘consultants’, who had been completely MIA when Joe Biden’s autopen administration let H20 chips and different superior applied sciences freely stream to China, now fake to care about our nationwide and financial safety,” White Home spokesman Kush Desai advised CNBC.
Regardless of Trump permitting chip gross sales to renew, it has already grow to be clear that China is not welcoming Nvidia again with open arms, as a substitute urging tech firms to keep away from shopping for U.S. firms’ chips, in accordance with a Bloomberg report.
“We’re listening to that this can be a exhausting mandate, and that [authorities are actually] stopping extra orders of H20s for some firms,” Qingyuan Lin, a senior analyst masking China semiconductors at Bernstein, advised CNBC.
In a separate report, The Info stated regulators in China have ordered main tech firms, together with ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, to droop Nvidia chip purchases till a nationwide safety evaluation is full.
— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report