Trump says Nvidia can’t sell China its best AI chips

President Donald Trump has indicated that Nvidia will have to reserve its most advanced chips for U.S. companies and hold them back from China and other countries.

Trump said Sunday that only U.S. customers should be able to access Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, its top-end product. “We don’t give (the Blackwell) chip to other people,” he said on Air Force One. He echoed the statement in an interview with CBS, adding: “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States.”

The suggestion is that Trump will tighten access to the best U.S.-made AI chips, a departure from previous indications from officials. In July, the administration released a blueprint for expanding AI exports to allies as part of a bid to keep its technology edge over China.

Nvidia said on Friday that it would ship 260,000 of the Blackwell chips to South Korea and some of its top firms including Samsung. Trump also suggested in August that he might allow sales of a less powerful version of the product to China.

Shares in Nvidia rose 2% Monday morning after Microsoft said it secured export licenses to ship the chipmaker’s products to the United Arab Emirates. The licenses mean it can ship more than 60,000 A100 chips, which have Nvidia’s more advanced GB300 GPUs.

Speaking to CBS, Trump said: “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced.”

Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping last week at a summit in South Korea, where the two agreed an interim trade accord that offered relief to both countries following six months of turbulent negotiations. He had hinted Blackwell chips might be part of discussions but later said they did not come up.

In October, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the company’s China business is now “100% out,” describing a collapse from “95% market share to 0%” as U.S. and Chinese policy squeezed the company from both sides. “In all of our forecasts, we assume zero for China,” he added. “If anything happens there — which I hope it will — that will be a bonus.”

The comments marked Huang’s bluntest acknowledgment yet that tightening controls on the company’s advanced chip sales have effectively erased one of Nvidia’s biggest markets. Washington first banned exports of Nvidia’s most powerful AI accelerators, then extended the rules to neutered “A-series” chips designed specifically for China that came after a revenue deal.

Beijing then warned state-linked firms not to buy Nvidia products over national-security concerns and urged procurement of domestic alternatives such as Huawei’s Ascend line. It meant that a market once responsible for roughly a quarter of Nvidia’s data-center revenue vanished almost overnight.