Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), who leads the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, is opposing the Trump administration's choice to permit tech firm Nvidia to resell specific AI chips to China.
In a message addressed to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday, the congressman expressed worries regarding the change of stance on Nvidia's H20 chips, implying it might enhance China's artificial intelligence development.
"The H20, an affordable and high-performance AI inference chip, greatly exceeds China's local capabilities and would thus significantly boost China's advancement in artificial intelligence," Moolenaar stated.
On Monday, Nvidia stated that the semiconductor company is resubmitting requests to sell its H20 chips following guarantees from the Trump administration regarding license approvals.
A semiconductor company disclosed earlier this year that the U.S. administration had introduced updated licensing rules, which would restrict its capacity to export chips into China. This change occurred not long after Nvidia's chief executive, Jensen Huang, held discussions with President Trump.
Lutnick proposed that the Trump administration chose to relax the regulations as part of an extensive rare earth agreement with China, emphasizing that Beijing is receiving only Nvidia’s "second-best" chip.
Nevertheless, Moolenaar stated that the main point is how the H20 chip measures up against ones being created in China and suggested that the Commerce Department should base its export restrictions on a "minor technological advancement" over China's present abilities.
The Trump administration has consistently emphasized that the U.S. needs to make sure that American, not Chinese, technology firms develop the worldwide AI framework," he noted. "However, at the same time, we must also prevent the rest of the world from using Chinese AI systems that have been developed with U.S. technological input.
Allowing the sale of significant quantities of H20s might provide China with the computational resources necessary to create advanced AI models available to users at no cost, similar to what DeepSeek achieved with R1," Moolenaar added. "Like how China has approached numerous other sectors, this represents an intentional plan to gain market dominance and establish itself as the worldwide benchmark.
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