Howard Lutnick says China is only getting Nvidia’s ‘4th best’ AI chip
The US Trade Secretary Howard Lutnick speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Trade Secretary Howard Lotnick said on Tuesday that the Trump administration reversed the course to allow Nvidia Since the US company will not give the best technology, selling AI chips to China.
Lutnick made a speech with Brian Sullivan of CNBC and “best 4th best 4.” He said he wanted to sell his chip.
“We don’t sell them the best items to them, not the second best items, not even the third best.” He said.
On Monday night, Nvidia said that the H20 chip will continue its sales to China after pointing out that the Trump administration will provide the necessary export licenses to the chipset.
Lutnick said that the renewed sales of the H20 chips to China is linked to a rare magnet agreement. Lutnick said that having Chinese companies using American technology is the interests of the United States, so they continue to use an American “pile of technology”.
“Fourth, we want to continue to use China.” He said. “We want to make the Chinese use the American pile of technology, because they still trust it.”
Similarly, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that in recent weeks, the US should continue to sell the chips to China, so that Chinese companies did not invest in homemade infrastructure. On Sunday, Huang also said that the Chinese army would still not use Nvidia chips, and that China was a legitimate competitor before.
“The idea is more than being able to build themselves.” He said. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can do, so they continue to take our chips.”
Reversal is a big win for Nvidia. Huang said that the Trump administration’s decision to claim a license for the H20 chip in April “effectively closed the Chinese market.” Nvidia said he could sell $ 8 billion in the H20 chips in the existing quarter before the sales were stopped.
After President Donald Trump met with Huang in Washington last week, he reversed his administration decision.
“You want to sell enough to make Chinese developers dependent on the American pile of American technology,” Lutnick said. He said. “This thought.”
The H20 chip was introduced in 2022 in response to Biden management export controls. It is based on the same basic technology as Nvidia’s Hopper generation chips, which are sold as finished systems in the US by using H100 or H200 chips.
The US chipset received some features from the H20 to sell to China, including the lower bandwidth that connects less graphic processing unit nuclei and separate parts of the chip. However, the success of the Deepseek R1 model claimed that there were many good Chinese companies. Slow chips. Lutnick said China is behind the Nvidia’s Nvidia’s Blackwell Cips, H100 and H200.
Nvidia says that every year it releases new artificial intelligence chips and that serious AI developers should always try to get it. Latest and largest versions Because technology is developing very quickly.
Today, the best AI chips that expand from clouds and system producers are called Blackwell and come as a GB200 chip with B100 and B200 versions as well as the paired central processing unit. Nvidia also makes a series of Blackwell -based chips that can be used for AI for games and graphics, but is usually weaker than the largest chips designed for data centers.
A successor called Blackwell Ultra is now starting to be installed in data centers and is expected to ramp for the next year. In 2027, Nvidia will release the “Vera Rubin” chips.
