EMERGENCY POD: Trump to Sell H200s to China
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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AUKUS
12 min read
Linked in the article (39 min read)
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Wassenaar Arrangement
11 min read
The article discusses export controls on advanced technology to adversaries, comparing current chip sales to Cold War-era supercomputer restrictions. The Wassenaar Arrangement is the multilateral export control regime that governs dual-use technology exports and provides essential context for understanding how nations coordinate restrictions on sensitive technology transfers.
Here to discuss is of the Silverado Policy Accelerator.
We get into:
Why this is, in Dmitri’s words, “a disaster”
There are military balance of power implications for selling chips to China
Why the rest of the AI ecosystem is against selling chips to China, Why Trump made this call anyway, and why SME export liberalization might be next
Where the GAIN Act goes from here
Listen now on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
Jordan Schneider: Let’s first toast the unfortunate U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, Nicholas Jon Ganjei. On Monday morning, he proudly issued a press release for his cool-sounding “Operation Gatekeeper,” which intercepted $160 million worth of Nvidia H100s and H200s.
That afternoon, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that the United States would allow Nvidia to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China. Dmitri, please make sense of this for me.
Dmitri Alperovitch: There’s no way to sugarcoat this — it’s a disaster. This isn’t only about the Department of Justice. The U.S. Attorney General’s statement highlighted how critical AI is to military applications. The President’s own AI action plan discussed how the United States must aggressively adopt AI within its armed forces to maintain its global military preeminence, while ensuring that the use of AI is secure and reliable. This technology is essential to U.S. military dominance and the successes of the U.S. Intelligence community.
You have to give the administration credit — it is doing a lot to ensure all levels of the U.S. government are adopting AI. Why we would enable China to do the same is beyond me. Are we going to sell them aircraft carriers or Virginia-class submarines? Should we let them into AUKUS? This is effectively what we are doing.
It is outrageous that Jensen Huang has been able to pull the wool over the eyes of people in government and on Capitol Hill, convincing them that arming our primary adversary — the one we are unquestionably in a cold war with — is somehow good for America. I understand it’s good for Nvidia’s sales and for him personally, but it is a disaster for our national security.
Jordan Schneider: What I find baffling is the contradiction in Nvidia’s public messaging. Jensen Huang and his company argue
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