Republican calls out Trump on GPU sales to China • The Register

The Republican chair of the US Home Choose Committee on China has protested the Trump administration’s determination this week to carry restrictions on the sale of Nvidia H20 GPUs and related processors, warning the chips could possibly be used to advance Chinese language AI and navy pursuits.

“We should not enable US corporations to promote these very important synthetic intelligence (AI) property to Chinese language entities,” Consultant John Moolenaar (R-MI), who chairs the committee, wrote in a letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.

The Trump administration had beforehand moved to dam the sale of Nvidia’s H20 and related silicon again in April for worry that they may discover their manner into Chinese language supercomputers. Nvidia’s H20, alongside AMD’s MI308 {hardware}, have been initially launched as cut-down variations of their extra highly effective siblings with a purpose to adjust to US export controls governing the sale of AI accelerators to China.

Following the choice, Nvidia estimated the choice would cost the GPU large almost $10.5 billion within the first half of its 2026 fiscal 12 months. AMD reported the export ban would cost the agency $1.5 billion in misplaced revenues in 2025.

This week, the efficient ban was lifted, with the chipmakers announcing they’d utilized for licenses to renew gross sales of the accelerators, with Nvidia reporting that the “U.S. authorities has assured NVIDIA that licenses will likely be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to begin deliveries quickly.”

Executives from each Nvidia and AMD have argued that if the US makes it too tough to acquire US semiconductors, they’re going to hunt down alternate options.

In his letter to Lutnick on Friday, Moolenaar rejected this assertion. “Nvidia can produce these chips at a scale that their Chinese language opponents can’t rival, making it unlikely that limiting H20 exports to China would merely shift demand to home Chinese language alternate options.”

Moolenaar’s feedback replicate current findings from Canadian analysis outlet TechInsights, which prompt SMIC, the Center Kingdom’s prime chip producer, stays generations behind the remainder of the world. 

Past their use in coaching Chinese language AI fashions, Moolenaar additionally warned that the chips could possibly be utilized by Beijing to construct supercomputers in violation of the Supercomputer end-use rule.

“Tencent reportedly used H20s to coach its Hunyuan-Massive mannequin — a mission that just about actually used a number of computing clusters requiring over 200 [petaFLOPS] of computing energy (roughly 4,550 H20 GPUs), which meets the US definition of a ‘supercomputer.'”

In case you are questioning, the US Export Administration Rules defines a supercomputer as:  “A computing ‘system’ having a collective most theoretical compute capability of 100 or extra double-precision (64-bit) petaFLOPS or 200 or extra single-precision (32-bit) petaFLOPS inside a 41,600 ft3 or smaller envelope.”

Primarily based on what little information there’s on the market on the H20’s increased precision efficiency, the chips help as much as 44 teraFLOPS at single-precision, which roughly aligns with the figures cited in Moolenaar’s letter to Lutnick.

Moolenaar closed his letter by demanding a briefing with Lutnick no later than August 8 to evaluate how the division plans to guage license functions for H20 and related chips.

The Register reached out to Moolenaar’s workplace for remark, however had not heard again on the time of publication. ®