United States | News & Politics

Two days after Cook and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had a closed-door meeting with Trump at the White House. The president later announced Nvidia, along with its rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), will be allowed to sell certain artificial intelligence chips to Chinese companies – so long as they share 15% of their revenue with the US government.

It was a dramatic about-face from Trump, who initially blocked the chips’ exports in April. And it swiftly prompted suggestions that Nvidia was buying its way out of simmering tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Trade experts say such a deal, where a company essentially pays the US government to export a good, could destabilize trading relations. Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said that it creates “the perception that export controls are up for sale”.

“If you create the perception that licenses, which are supposed to be determined on pure national security grounds, are up for sale, you potentially open up room for there to be this wave of lobbying for all sorts of really, dangerous, sensitive technologies,” Chorzempa said. “I think that’s a very dangerous precedent to set.”