Lawmakers and industry experts are warning that President Donald Trump’s decision on Monday to allow the sale of Nvidia-manufactured chips used in advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to China puts national security at risk.
President Trump said that he would allow Nvidia, one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers, to export its H200 chips to “approved customers” in China and other nations as long as the United States gets 25% of the profit.
Those sales will occur “under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security,” according to Trump, who said in a post to Truth Social that the news was responded to “positively” by Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While that deal received Xi’s approval, a coalition of top Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., Chris Coons, D-Del., Jack Reed, D-R.I., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, Andy Kim, D-N.J., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., and Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., have warned that the move puts U.S. national security at risk.
“The Trump administration’s announcement that it will allow the export of advanced H200 AI chips to China is a colossal economic and national security failure. The H200s are vastly more capable than anything China can make and gifting them to Beijing would squander America’s primary advantage in the AI race,” the lawmakers said in a joint statement.
It is unclear exactly how many H200 chips would be approved for shipment or what the “conditions” are that Trump referred to.
It’s also uncertain how many chips Chinese companies will buy. After Nvidia received approval to ship less-advanced chips to China this summer, Bloomberg reported that Chinese authorities warned companies against buying U.S.-made chips, prioritizing domestic chips instead.
Still, Democrats warned that the sale of these chips to China would give its military “transformational technology to make its weapons more lethal, carry out more effective cyberattacks against American businesses and critical infrastructure, and strengthen their economic and manufacturing sector.”
The lawmakers cited comments made by Chinese AI company DeepSeek that noted the lack of access to advanced U.S. chips is “the single biggest impediment to its ability to compete with U.S. AI companies.”
The export of U.S. chips to China has been a bipartisan concern and follows the proposed GAIN AI Act, which would require American semiconductor manufacturers to sell to U.S.-based companies before shipments abroad. That act was left out of the recent annual defense policy bill.
The United States also recently agreed to suspend through November 2026 a new export-control “affiliates rule” that had barred chip sales to subsidiaries of Entity List companies, temporarily rolling back a key restriction aimed at preventing Chinese firms from using shell companies to obtain advanced U.S. technology.
President Trump said that the Commerce Department is currently “finalizing the details” of H200 sales and will allow other U.S. chip manufacturers to sell advanced chips to China and other countries.