WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Discussions with the White House to allow American AI chip company Nvidia to sell a less advanced version of its next-generation advanced GPU chip to China will take time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Thursday.
When asked about White House talks on Blackwell chip sales to China in a Fox Business News interview, Huang said the discussions had started. “The conversation will take a while, but … President Trump understands that having the world build AI on the American tech stack helps America win the AI race.”
Earlier this month, Trump suggested he might allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of the chip in China, noting that it would be 30-50% less capable than the regular version.
That comes despite deep-seated fears in Washington that China could harness U.S. artificial intelligence capabilities to supercharge its military. China hawks fear allowing even stripped-down Blackwell chip sales to China could open the door to Beijing securing more advanced computing power from the U.S., even as the two countries battle for technology supremacy.
Reuters in May reported that Nvidia was preparing a new chip for China that was a variant of its most recent state-of-the-art AI Blackwell chips at a significantly lower cost.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward and Alexandra Alper, Editing by Franklin Paul, Rod Nickel)
