Researchers: US Should Keep Controls on Nvidia B30A Chips, Tighten Equipment Restrictions

On The AI Policy Podcast, hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, IFP fellows Georgia Adamson and Saif Khan said the B30A is significantly more powerful than Nvidia's H20, which the Trump administration agreed to let the company sell to China earlier this year (see 2510240038). Adamson said their findings show that the B30A is nearly 13 times better than the H20 in terms of raw processing performance and would outperform Huawei’s Ascend chip, the top Chinese-made AI chip.

A report recently released by Adamson, Khan and other IFP researchers said that if the U.S. were to allow Nvidia to freely sell its B30A chip to China -- as Nvidia hopes -- Chinese entities could match U.S. AI computing capabilities “at approximately the same cost and scale as their U.S. counterparts.” Exports of the B30A would “severely undermine existing chip export restrictions, rendering them functionally irrelevant.”

Their report was published days before tech policy nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation warned the administration against allowing Nvidia to export B30A chips to China as part of trade talks between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in South Korea last week (see 2510290019). Before those talks, Trump told reporters that he planned to speak about possibly allowing Nvidia to export some of its advanced chips to China, including its most advanced Blackwell chip, but he later backtracked and said the Blackwell wasn’t discussed (see 2510300026).

Allowing exports of B30A chips would appear to contradict the Trump administration’s January executive order that called on U.S. agencies to eliminate “loopholes” in export controls (see 2501210023), Adamson said. She also pointed to the administration’s AI Action Plan, which called for tighter chip controls (see 2507230028).

Allowing even a small number of B30A chips to be exported to China “would still run counter to the administration’s expressed policy goals, both by eroding America’s compute advantage and by providing the ‘highest-end’ US chip technology in price-performance terms -- just in different packaging,” the IFP report said.

The report also called on the U.S. and its allies to expand their export controls over the types of chip equipment that can be sent to China. One possibility would be to ban all exports to China of deep ultraviolet immersion lithography tools needed to make advanced AI chips, it said.

If the U.S. goal is to undercut China’s advanced chip equipment abilities, Khan said, stronger export controls on that equipment would be a more effective strategy than hoping China stays reliant on U.S.-made chips. Some U.S. officials have argued that flooding the Chinese market with American-made chips would decrease demand for Chinese-made chips and keep Chinese firms hooked on American semiconductors (see 2509250052).

“The more effective way to limit Huawei's influence in China and its expansion in chipmaking is not to sell chips to China in the hopes that will decrease demand for Huawei chips,” Khan said. “On the supply side, Huawei is already limited. It could be limited more with further semiconductor manufacturing equipment restrictions.”

Gregory Allen, director of the Wadhwani AI Center at CSIS, said Chinese companies have long been stockpiling chip equipment, which shows that they fear new U.S. export controls. “They're buying all the equipment they can possibly buy -- even faster than they can install the equipment -- because they’re afraid of future export controls on other equipment and components.”