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Nvidia would be blocked from selling advanced chips to China under a bipartisan bill that US senators introduced on Thursday as part of an effort to make it harder for Beijing to obtain critical American AI-related technology.
The Secure and Feasible Exports Chips Act would require the commerce secretary to deny export licences for advanced chips to China for 30 months. The bill would prevent Nvidia from selling the H200 and Blackwell, its most advanced chip, to China.
It comes as the White House weighs whether to allow Nvidia to export the H200 to China — a possibility that has alarmed some officials.
Pete Ricketts, the Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations east Asia sub-committee, who co-sponsored the legislation with Chris Coons, the top Democrat on the panel, said the US was leading in the artificial intelligence race with China largely because of its “dominance of global compute power”.
“Denying Beijing access to these chips is therefore essential,” Ricketts said. “Codifying President Trump’s current AI chip limitations on Communist China as US chip companies continue to rapidly innovate will allow us to widen our compute lead exponentially.”
Coons said: “The rest of the 21st century will be determined by who wins the AI race, and whether this technology is built on American values of free thought and free markets or the values of the Chinese Communist party.”
Other senators sponsoring the bill are Republicans Tom Cotton and Dave McCormick and Democrats Jeanne Shaheen and Andy Kim.
The bill comes as China hawks in Washington fear Donald Trump is ignoring security issues to preserve the trade deal he agreed with Chinese President Xi Jinping in October.
The FT reported on Wednesday that the US Treasury had halted plans to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security spy agency over “Salt Typhoon”, a massive cyber penetration of American telecom groups.
US officials said the administration did not plan to issue any big new export controls on China for the time being.
China would benefit greatly from access to Nvidia’s H200 chips, said Saif Khan, a chips expert at the Institute for Progress think-tank.
“Unfettered access to the H200 would allow China to build frontier-scale AI supercomputers to develop the most powerful AI systems, just at a moderately higher cost relative to cutting-edge Blackwell chips,” said Khan, a former White House and commerce department official.
“It would also arm Chinese cloud providers to compete globally with US hyperscalers.”
Nvidia chief Jensen Huang was in Washington on Wednesday and met Trump and Republican senators on the banking committee. Ahead of the meeting with the committee, he said Beijing would not accept degraded chips and that US companies should be able to export their most competitive chips to China.
John Kennedy, a Republican senator on the committee, told reporters Huang was not a “credible source” on what the US should export to China.
“He’s got more money than the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and he wants even more,” Kennedy said, according to the Associated Press.
“If I’m looking for someone to give me objective advice about whether we should make our technology available to China, he’s not it,” he added.
Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist in the first Trump administration who is influential in the Maga movement, said the US should not be exporting advanced chips to China, particularly as Chinese companies such as DeepSeek have made such advances in AI.
“If this is in fact a ‘Sputnik Moment’ because of DeepSeek then we should ban all chip sales, especially high-end, but also stop all financial support — no access to debt or equity capital markets, no training, no Chinese students — just like in the cold war about nuclear weapons,” Bannon said.
He also took aim at Huang and David Sacks, the White House AI adviser who backs selling high-end chips to China as part of an AI “action plan” to make countries reliant on the American “technology stack”.
“David Sacks has acted as the agent for the Chinese Communist party and Jensen Huang is the arms merchant,” Bannon said.
Asked about the bill, Nvidia said the AI action plan “wisely recognises non-military businesses everywhere should be able to choose the American technology stack, promoting US jobs and promoting national security”.
In response to Bannon’s comment, the company said: “AI is not an atomic bomb. No one should have an atomic bomb. Everyone should have AI.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.