The Daily Populous Thursday August 14th, 2025 morning edition
Authored by thefp.com and submitted by HooverInstitution

President Donald Trump’s team just gave China’s rulers the technology they need to beat us in the artificial intelligence race. If he doesn’t reverse this decision, it may be remembered as the moment when America surrendered the technological advantage needed to bring manufacturing home and keep our nation secure.

His advisers, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, persuaded him to lift his ban on exporting Nvidia’s powerful H20 chips to China, which desperately needs these chips to make its AI smarter. The president should have stuck with his gut.

In exchange, the U.S. government has apparently become a financial beneficiary in AI chip sales to China: Press reports indicate that Nvidia and AMD (another chipmaker) have agreed to turn over 15% of their China chip revenues as a condition for obtaining export licenses, an arrangement that effectively monetizes what was supposed to be a national security restriction.

Don’t believe the claims that these chips aren’t very advanced. Before Trump banned them from export to China in April, H20s were instrumental in China’s DeepSeek AI model that shocked the world in January. DeepSeek’s CEO publicly admitted that United States “bans on shipments of advanced chips” are his company’s biggest challenge. In May, a senior executive at Chinese tech giant Tencent said he expected the ban on the H20 to “widen the gap” the U.S. enjoys over China in AI.

China’s lack of unfettered access to U.S.-designed AI chips is America’s clearest advantage in the AI race. By reversing the ban, the White House is helping Beijing’s Communist regime close the gap.

stopstopp on August 14th, 2025 at 02:53 UTC »

What? No, the export ban is what did it. Before all this debacle Chinese companies were happy to buy US tech and be forever reliant on it despite beijings wishes. Now it’s the opposite, everybody in the country knows it needs tech independence and so SMIC, Huawei, and others have a customer base locked in.

The sanctions is what will go in the history books. You can do it to countries without the scientific where-how like Russia, Cuba, or North Korea. You can’t to China.

Przedrzag on August 13rd, 2025 at 22:44 UTC »

Trump is the most pro-Beijing president since Nixon, and despite his tariff bluster this was true in his first term too

HooverInstitution on August 13rd, 2025 at 22:24 UTC »

Writing at The Free Press, Distinguished Visiting Fellow Matthew Pottinger and coauthor Liza Tobin warn that President Trump’s decision to lift the ban on exporting Nvidia’s “powerful H20 chips” to China “may be remembered as the moment when America surrendered the technological advantage needed to bring manufacturing home and keep our nation secure.” Noting that Nvidia and fellow chipmaker AMD have entered into a revenue sharing agreement with the US government as a condition of this deal, Pottinger and Tobin argue that this “effectively monetizes what was supposed to be a national security restriction.” The authors push back against claims that the chips now permitted for export have little national security relevance by showing evidence that Chinese entities, including the People’s Liberation Army, plan to use the chips for “a range of weapons systems, including robotic dogs.” As the authors—both first-term Trump administration officials—conclude, “We shouldn’t hand our adversaries the tools to beat us.”