The technology industry There is a lot of confusion about President Trump’s new agreement. Nvidia. Trump announced earlier this week that he will allow the company continue to sell its H20 chip to China, in exchange for 15 percent of revenues.
“The H20 is obsolete. You know, it’s one of those things, but it still has a market,” Trump stated at the press conference held on Monday. “So we negotiated a little deal.”
Unusual and legally dubious The Trump administration has made a dramatic reversal after it banned H20 sales in China at the beginning of this year. After meeting with the Chinese, it is reported that Trump changed his opinion about this issue. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang“Who” has argued It is not a threat to US security to allow Chinese firms to purchase H20s.
One hand, it’s a story about an apparent president who was influenced to act in the best interest of his business by a powerful executive. The story is more complex and interesting than it appears.
Nvidia launched the H20 chip last year, after the US Government banned it from selling the H800 to China. This was a part of a larger project that officials in the Biden administration orchestrated to stop China developing artificial intelligence.
In the last few months I have been working with Graham Webster. He is a Stanford University researcher who has sought to better understand why Biden’s team felt the US had to restrict China’s ability to access advanced semiconductors. WIRED publishes Graham’s article today. definitive account Based on more than ten interviews conducted with former US policy and government officials, including some who spoke under the condition of anonymity.
“I did this piece because the official legal justification for the controls, military and human rights, was obviously never the whole story,” Graham spoke to me. “Clearly AI was in the mix, and I wanted to understand why in some depth.”
Graham claims that Biden’s White House and Commerce Department had several high-ranking officials. “believed AI was approaching an inflection point—or several—that could give a nation major military and economic advantages. Some believed a self-improving system or so-called artificial general intelligence could be just over the technical horizon. The risk that China could reach these thresholds first was too great to ignore.”
The Biden team took action. They announced broad export controls in the fall 2022 to prevent China from gaining access to the latest chips needed for powerful AI systems and specialized equipment Beijing required to modernize their own chip-making industry.
This move marked the beginning of a project lasting several years. “would reshape relations between the world’s two largest powers and alter the course of what may be one of the most consequential technologies in generations,” Graham Writes
What struck me about Graham’s story Many people who were involved with Biden’s policies on export controls have moved to influential positions within the fields of AI, computing and national security. Jason Matheny is the President and CEO of RAND. This prominent think-tank, which often works with government clients, was the White House’s lead on national security and technology policy. Tarun Chabra is now the national security director at Anthropic. Previously, he worked for the National Security Council.
