White House can't get its story straight on who has access to Nvidia’s chips
During a Sunday interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” President Trump insisted he wouldn't let Nvidia’s (NVDA) Blackwell chips go to China or any foreign company.
“We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced,” Trump said about China. “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States.”
By all indications, Trump and Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang have a solid relationship, which has no doubt been helped by Huang not being shy in lavishing praise on the president.
But the issue of China is one in which the two men do not see eye to eye and with good reason.
Huang and Nvidia have essentially been caught in the crosshairs of Trump' s contentious trade war with Beijing, causing it to lose one of its most valuable markets.
Huang has said that China made up between 20% to 25% of the company’s data center revenue, accounting for more than $41 billion in its most recent quarterly earnings.
That was good for a 56% year-over-year revenue increase, showing that China was continuing to be a growth market for Nvidia.
But last month, Huang said that its business in China was now “100% out,” adding that it had gone from “95% market share to 0%.”
“In all forecasts, we assume zero for China,” he said. “If anything happens there — which I hope it will — that will be a bonus.”
At the request of Huang, Trump was reportedly planning to talk to Chinese leader Xi Jinping about Nvidia during their meeting in South Korea last week.
But he decided not to address it after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned him that giving China access to Nvidia’s chips would create a national security threat for the United States.
Ban on Blackwell exports has caveats
During a news conference at Nvidia’s GTC event in Washington, D.C. last week, Huang was much more blunt in his assessment of the trade impasse, urging the US government to allow exports to China.
"They've made it very clear that they don't want Nvidia to be there right now,” he said. "I hope that will change in the future because I think China is a very important market.”
In fact, Huang said that if the administration continues to pursue trade policies that isolate America from China, it ultimately “hurts us more.”
But even as Trump maintained in his interview with “60 Minutes” on Sunday that the government would not allow Nvidia’s “most advanced” Blackwell chips to be used anywhere outside the US, this doesn’t actually seem to be the case.
On Monday, Microsoft (MSFT) provided an update on its pledged $15.2 billion investment in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which was originally announced in 2023.
The company said it had licenses approved in September with “stringent” safeguards that will allow it to ship more than 60,000 Nvidia chips to the UAE for use in the country’s data centers, including the most advanced GB300 Grace Blackwell chips.
The announcement contradicts Trump’s claim that Nvidia’s most advanced chips would only be allowed in the US, an indication that China will continue to be treated differently than other trade partners, no matter how much Huang lobbies to reopen the market.
It should be noted, however, that the UAE has pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in US energy and AI-related endeavors, giving it some added leverage.
Meanwhile, Nvidia itself said last week that it would be exporting 50K of its latest GPUs in support of accelerating the South Korean government’s efforts to strengthen its AI infrastructure.
As part of this initiative, Nvidia also announced that Samsung Electronics would be building an AI factory in South Korea with another 50K Nvidia GPUs.
Nvidia’s stock is up 54.1% for the year.