Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, proper, speaks alongside President Donald Trump about investing in America, on the White House in Washington, on April 30, 2025.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
Six Senate Democrats on Friday released an open letter asking President Donald Trump to rethink his resolution to enable tech giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to promote AI semiconductor chips to China in alternate for 15% of income from the 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% minimize of income from chip sales to China in alternate 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 superior AI chips — particularly Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips — to China might assist strengthen its navy techniques, a declare that Nvidia denies.
In an announcement to CNBC, a Nvidia spokesperson stated: “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 response from the administration by Friday, Aug. 22, concerning the present deal involving Nvidia and AMD, in addition to any related preparations being made with different 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 House and AMD was not instantly returned.
Despite Trump permitting chip sales to resume, it has already turn out to be clear that China is not welcoming Nvidia again with open arms, as a substitute urging tech corporations to avoid buying U.S. companies’ chips, in accordance to a Bloomberg report.
“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 protecting China semiconductors at Bernstein, informed CNBC.
In a separate report, The Information stated regulators in China have ordered main tech corporations, together with ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, to droop Nvidia chip purchases till a nationwide safety evaluate is full.
— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report