Because Trump put on Nvidia by selling H20 chips in China

The technological industry He is recovering from the surprising new agreement of President Trump with Nvidia. At the beginning of this week, Trump said he would allow the company to continue selling his H20 chips in China in exchange for a 15 % share of revenues.

“The H20 is obsolete. You know, it’s one of those things, but still has a market,” Trump said in a press conference on Monday. “So we negotiated a small deal.”

The unusual e legally doubtful The agreement is a surprising reversal for the Trump administration, which prohibited all H20 sales in China at the beginning of this year. According to reports, the president changed his mind about the issue after meeting the CEO of Nvidia Jensen Huang, who discussed What allows Chinese companies to buy H20 does not represent a risk to national security of the United States.

On the one hand, this is a simple story about a president who seems to have been influenced by a powerful executive examination in the interest of his company. But under the surface, there is a much more interesting and complicated saga on how we arrived here.

Nvidia introduced the H20 last year after the United States government prohibited the company to sell a more powerful chip, the H800, in China. The move was part of an ambitious project orchestrated by Biden administration officials who believed that the United States needed to prevent China from developing advanced artificial intelligence first.

In recent months, I have worked closely with Graham Webster, a Stanford University researcher who tried to understand how and why the Biden team decided that the United States had to curb China’s access to advanced semiconductors in the first place. Today, Wired publishes Graham’s final report on what really happened behind the scenes, based on interviews with more than 10 former US officials and political experts, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.

“I did this piece because the official control justification for controls, military and human rights, it has never been the whole story,” Graham told me. “Clearly the IA was in the mix and I wanted to understand why in depth.”

Graham writes that several key officials in the White House and in the Biden Department of Commerce “believed that the IA was approaching a point of inflexion-o Different-E could give a nation important military and economic advantages. Some believed that a self-metal system or the so-called general artificial intelligence could only be too much in artificial intelligence.

So the Biden team decided to act. In the autumn of 2022, they revealed large export checks aimed at preventing China from accessing the most advanced chips required for the formation of powerful artificial intelligence systems, as well as the specialized equipment that Beijing necessary to modernize their chip industry.

The move was the beginning of a multi -year project that “would have remodeled the relationships between the two largest powers of the world and alter the course of what could be one of the most consequential technologies of the generations”, writes Graham.

What struck me about Graham’s history is how many people involved in biden export control policies have passed into other influential positions in the world of artificial intelligence, calculation and national security. Jason Matheny, who guided the White House politics on technology and national security, is now president and CEO of Rand, an important Think Tank that often serves government customers. Tarun Chhabra, who has worked on the national security council, now guides the national security policy in anthropic.