Not everyone is happy that the Trump administration has given Nvidia a green light and has started selling H20 advanced AI chips in China again.
A group of 20 national security experts and former government officials wrote a letter to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Monday, urging the Trump administration to reverse its recent decision to sell H20 AI chips in China.
The letter is called the Trump administration’s recent decision and is called a “strategic mistake” that has detrimental impact on the US AI “edge” for both military and civilian use cases.
The letter specifically called AI inference in H20, calling the process of determining invisible data using a trained AI model.
“The H20 is a powerful accelerator for China’s frontier AI capabilities and is not an outdated AI chip,” the letter states. “The H20, specifically designed to avoid export control thresholds, is optimized for inference. This is a dramatic ability-enhancing process performed by the latest generation of frontier AI inference models. In the inference task, if above the H100, the AI chip limits access because this management has progressed.”
The letter also claimed that selling H20 chips in China would exacerbate the existing US AI chip bottleneck. These chips can be used to support Chinese troops. And this decision will weaken overall chip export control.
“The decision to ban H20 exports earlier this year was right,” the letter said. “We ask that we endure that principle and continue to block the sale of advanced AI chips to China, where the US works to maintain its technology advantage. This is not a trade issue, it is a national security issue.
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Signatories for the letter include Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term. Stewart Baker, former deputy secretary for homeland security under George W. Bush. David Faith, a former member of the National Security Council.
The letter comes two weeks after Doc gives Nvidia a green light and starts selling AI chips again in China, in connection with the ongoing trade debate with China over rare earth elements. At the time, Lutnick tried to downplay the decision, saying Nvidia’s H20 was the company’s “fourth-best” AI chip.
Last week, the Trump administration announced its AI Action Plan. This underscored the need for US AI chip export restrictions, but it was light on the details of what those export controls would look like.
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