Experts Urge Congress to Block Sale of Nvidia H200 Chips to China
Citing economic and national security concerns, a panel of experts called on lawmakers Jan. 14 to overturn the Trump administration’s decision last month to allow Nvidia to export its H200 AI chips to China (see 2512080059).
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Although the Commerce Department plans to place conditions on the sale, no such restrictions would be adequate to address the risks, the witnesses testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“Some at Commerce are trying to stem the bleeding by putting terms and conditions into the export regulations -- a valiant effort, but not nearly enough,” said Matt Pottinger, deputy U.S. national security adviser in the first Trump administration. “Congress needs to step in, reverse the policy, and put durable guardrails in place so the mistake can’t be repeated.”
Pottinger said that obtaining H200 chips will give China an opportunity to steal American intellectual property to improve its own chips and compete with U.S. firms. “So Nvidia may actually be sort of seeding their own demise,” he said. Pottinger added that the more chips the U.S. makes for China, the fewer that will be able to provide to American firms due to limited chipmaking capacity.
Oren Cass, founder and chief economist at policy advocacy group American Compass, said that no matter what conditions the U.S. imposes on the sale of H200s to China it will be “impossible” to keep China from using the chips for its military, given the country’s military-civil fusion policy.
“It’s important to remember that this is an authoritarian, communist country,” Cass testified. “The idea that [Chinese AI startup] DeepSeek would develop some sort of breakthrough that could be valuable to the military and then turn around and say to the Chinese Communist Party, ‘I’m sorry, we agreed we weren’t going to share this with you,” it’s laughable and it shouldn’t be a basis for how we structure our controls.”
Jon Finer, principal deputy national security adviser in the Biden administration, said that U.S. chip controls, along with American and allied restrictions on chipmaking tools, have helped limit China’s capabilities. Allowing the sale of advanced chips to China will make it harder for the U.S. to convince its allies to continue withholding their advanced chipmaking tools from China, he warned.
Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on South and Central Asia, which oversees BIS, said the rule BIS issued this week to implement Trump’s H200 decision contains welcome safeguards (see 2601130073). But he cautioned that “rules and regulations are only as good as your willingness to enforce them, and that is what we're going to be watching for on this.”
Finer said that implementing the complex new rule will be time-consuming, taxing BIS’s limited resources amid an already extensive license application backlog. "The idea that we're going to be doing this labor-intensive review to have chips end up going to China, as opposed to partners, allies and other places, does not strike me as the best possible use of BIS resources," he testified.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to return to the topic of chip exports Jan. 21, when it is scheduled to mark up a bill by committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., that would increase congressional oversight of sales of advanced AI chips to China and other “countries of concern" (see 2512190054).