Trump: US, China to Speak About Nvidia's Blackwell Chip
Nvidia’s Blackwell AI processors, the company’s latest advanced AI chip, will be part of trade negotiations in talks with China this week, President Donald Trump told reporters Oct. 28.
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Speaking on Air Force One ahead of his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Oct. 30, Trump said, "we'll be speaking about Blackwell.”
“It’s the super-duper chip,” he said. “Blackwell is amazing.” He added that it’s “probably 10 years ahead of any other chip.”
“And unlike a lot of other businesses, you just can’t catch -- mostly you can copy and you can do things -- you really can’t, in the chip business, for whatever reason. It doesn't work that way.”
Trump also said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “presented” him with the first Blackwell chip in the Oval Office a few days ago.
“It’s an amazing thing that they’ve done. But that’s our country. We’re about 10 years ahead of anybody else in chips, in the highly sophisticated chips,” Trump said. “I think we may be talking about that with President Xi.”
Trump’s comments came after the administration earlier this year announced plans to allow Nvidia to sell its previously restricted H20 chips to China in exchange for the company giving the government a 15% cut of its sales revenue from those exported chips (see 2508220003), although Nvidia has suggested that those license applications haven’t been granted (see 2509260019). Trump signaled at the time that he may also allow Nvidia to export to China a diminished version of the company’s more sophisticated Blackwell chip (see 2508110044).
Soon after, Beijing reportedly ordered its top companies to stop buying Nvidia chips (see 2510240038). Trump, speaking to reporters this week, declined to say whether the U.S. will push Beijing to resume purchases of Nvidia chips.
“China actually terminated their relationship with Nvidia. That was a big thing,” Trump said. “But in the meantime, Nvidia hit a brand-new high” in earnings.
Trump is believed to be the first U.S. president to use sensitive national-security-related trade restrictions, such as export controls, as bargaining chips in trade negotiations (see 2506120061). U.S. lawmakers and former national security officials have urged the administration to reverse its decision to approve exports of Nvidia’s advanced AI chips to China and have called on Trump to refrain from including export controls in trade talks with the country (see 2507280012).
Tech policy nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation warned the administration this week against allowing Nvidia to export its “powerful” chips to China, saying it could “meaningfully narrow, and potentially fully erase, the US lead in AI compute.”
That includes Nvidia’s B30A, a chip that Nvidia is reportedly tailoring for the Chinese market and outperforms the H20 but isn’t as advanced as the Blackwell, ARI said. Although B30A may be “half as powerful as Blackwell chips designed for U.S. companies, the risks of selling China the B30A are not halved,” the group said. The chips could allow Chinese labs to “assemble training clusters that closely match US state-of-the-art with only modest extra spend.”
“The sale of B30A chips to the [People’s Republic of China] would also hand Chinese cloud providers price-competitive US chips to win global market share and diffuse advanced computing across PRC state and defense ecosystems,” ARI said. “None of these outcomes align with the Administration’s objective to ‘maintain, obtain, and enhance’ our technological edge.”
The group's memo outlined the potential effects of B30A exports to China, saying they represent a “giant step up” from the H20 and are 18 times the “US export-control performance thresholds that currently gate China-bound AI chips.”
“It is not a modest, compliance-friendly chip,” the group said. “It is a frontier-class accelerator designed for the PRC market.”
The U.S. should instead “deny export licenses for the B30A entirely,” it said, adding that this would help preserve America’s lead in cutting-edge chip technology through 2027. But if U.S. policymakers decide that they will allow a “limited” version of the chip to be exported, that should be “strictly confined to non-frontier accelerators that fall below current export thresholds” both in its technical specifications and “price-performance” capability.
“This distinction is critical: a chip that meets compliance on paper can still, when deployed at scale, erode U.S. aggregate compute advantages,” ARI said. “Any narrow authorization should include explicit annual unit caps, rigorous end-use monitoring, and automatic revocation clauses in the event of diversion or leakage to high-risk entities.”