NVIDIA and AMD have reached an agreement with the US government that will allow both companies to resume the sale of their AI chips to China.
It has been reported that NVIDIA and AMD have been granted export licenses to resume trading in China, but they will pay a 15% levy on the revenue made to the US.
In April, US President Donald Trump expressed his dismay that the US was losing some of its technological edge, and announced that companies would need to apply for export licenses.
Washington and Beijing have been locked in an economic arm wrestle for years, and now the race for AI-dominance is at the heart of the Trump administration.
The US has major national security concerns when it comes to Chinese companies, but the decision to allow NVIDIA and AMD to sell their H20 and MI308 chips will be seen as a surprise by many analysts.
Since returning to The Oval Office, US President Donald Trump has launched a war on tariffs and has made no secret of his disdain at the country’s tech giants having most of their manufacturing outside of the United States.
Last week, Apple pledged another $100bn into manufacturing in the United States, which many believed was done to avoid any future tariffs that the Trump administration should impose.
Trump said he wants to see iPhones that are sold in the US, manufactured domestically.
Nvidia reconfigured its H100 chip for China after the US introduced export controls in October 2023. At the beginning of the year, there was a huge surge in demand for the H20 chip from Chinese tech players such as Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance.
