China hawks are urging caution in response to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent saying that the Trump administration would be open to selling Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China on a delay.
Some policymakers argue that the United States needs to be cautious about selling advanced chips to the Asian nation — even when they are no longer on the cutting edge — given the fierce competition between Washington and Beijing over artificial intelligence. Both the Biden administration and now the Trump administration have taken steps to deny China the most cutting-edge chips, as the prospect of conflict with the country over AI or Taiwan has loomed larger.
President Donald Trump and top policy advisers reportedly mulled bringing up Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chips during his recent meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, although he was dissuaded from doing so. But Bessent on Tuesday hinted that those chips could be sold a year or two from now, when they are no longer cutting-edge.
Bessent said in an interview on CNBC that Nvidia’s Blackwell chips are the “crown jewel,” but added that other chips were the same way only 12 to 18 months ago.
“So there may be a case down the road, I don’t know, whether it’s 12 or 24 months, given the incredible innovation that goes on at Nvidia, where the Blackwell chips may be two, three, four down their chip stack in terms of efficacy, and at that point they could be sold on,” Bessent said.
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Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow and China expert at the right-leaning think tank the Hudson Institute, told the Washington Examiner the situation is nuanced. He said that the U.S. should compare Blackwell’s capabilities to what China can produce at the time, not necessarily just to future Nvidia chips themselves.
“The comparison we need to be making is, how does the Blackwell in one or two years compare to the best chips that Huawei can make inside of China?” Sobolik said. Huawei is a Chinese technology company tied to the government.
He said that if that gap is big, the U.S. should not equip its adversary with a chip beyond what it can produce.
“That comparison is the heart of it,” he said. “Instead of comparing the Blackwell to whatever else Nvidia makes for the global market, we should be comparing it to whatever Chinese companies are designing and producing inside of China.”
Derek Scissors is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on the Chinese and Indian economies, as well as U.S. economic relations with Asia. Scissors raised concerns beyond just the chips themselves and said the bigger issue is with technology being transferred to China.
“We’re not protecting the tech,” Scissors told the Washington Examiner.
Scissors said that the U.S. is not doing enough to prevent intellectual property theft or punish firms that transfer technology illegally.
“What I’m worried about is us helping the Chinese climb the ladder,” he said. “That’s the tech transfer part, which we don’t do anything on. We just pretend.”
Scissors also expressed major misgivings about the U.S. allowing sales of the Blackwell Nvidia chips to the United Arab Emirates, which has a “huge economic relationship” with China.
Microsoft said Monday that it will ship 60,000 Nvidia chips, including the GB300 Grace Blackwell chips, to the UAE. Microsoft said there would be “stringent” safeguards in place — something that Scissors pushed back on.
“They’re going to get the chips from the UAE,” he said. “I don’t mean the UAE is going to give them all the chips, I mean that anything China can learn from Nvidia chips, it has learned already or will learn from the UAE.”
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Bill Reinsch with the Center for Strategic and International Studies said that selling older or outdated chips to China would be a return to the prior U.S. policy stance on the matter.
“It’s basically the run-faster philosophy — as long as we’re ahead technologically, as long as our chips are ahead of theirs, it’s OK to sell them our older ones … we can make money doing that, which is good, and our companies can reinvest the money in building next generation chips, which is good, and it’s older stuff — we’re still ahead,” Reinsch said.
