Lawmakers, former officials press Commerce over NVIDIA’s chip sales to China

A NVIDIA spokesperson said criticisms of the company’s resumption of H20 chip sales to China “are misguided and inconsistent with the Administration's AI Action Plan.”

Former federal officials and lawmakers are joining calls for the Commerce Department to reconsider allowing NVIDIA to resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China, even as the tech giant says the resumption is consistent with AI guidance recently issued by the Trump administration.

Commerce initially banned sales of the H20 chips to China in April as part of enhanced export controls meant to limit Beijing’s access to advanced semiconductors. NVIDIA designed the H20 chip to comply with Biden-era restrictions, such as the AI diffusion rule, that otherwise blocked the sale of the hardware to China.

Earlier this month, however, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced that he met with President Donald Trump and other officials and said that “NVIDIA is ...