US President Donald Trump is weighing whether to allow Nvidia to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to China, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an interview to Bloomberg News on Monday.
The president is consulting "lots of different advisers" in deciding on the potential exports, the report said quoting Lutnick as saying.
The decision to authorise sales of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China is on Trump's desk, according to the report.
"That kind of decision sits right on the desk of Donald Trump," Lutnick told Bloomberg. "He will decide whether we go forward with that or not."
Lutnick conceded the conflict between boosting the economy and safeguarding national security.
"Do you want to sell China some chips and keep them using our tech and tech stack, or do you say to them, 'Look, we're not going to sell you our best chips. We're just going to hold off on that, and we're going to compete in the AI race ourselves,'" he said.
This follows media reports on Friday detailing early discussions among US officials regarding the sale of Nvidia's H200 AI chips to China.
Neither the White House nor Nvidia have offered comments yet.
The California-based Nvidia recently became the world's first $5 trillion company, although its market cap has receded since then to around $4.7 trillion.
Top-end Nvidia chips — used to train and power generative AI systems — are currently not sold in China due to US national security concerns and Chinese government bans.
Its CEO Jensen Huang has warned that China "is going to win" the race to develop next-generation artificial intelligence, urging Washington to speed up its efforts.
Supplying China with advanced AI chips signals a friendlier US approach to China, after Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping brokered a trade and tech war truce in Busan last month.
Trump and Xi discuss bilateral ties
On Monday, they spoke over phone to discuss bilateral cooperation and the issue of Taiwan, officials said.
Trump and Xi met in late October for the first time since 2019, engaging in closely watched trade talks between the world's top two economies.
The tussle between Washington and Beijing, which encompasses everything from rare earths to soybeans and port fees, has rocked markets and gummed up supply chains for months.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said Washington hoped to finalise a deal with Beijing for securing supplies of rare earths by the US Thanksgiving holiday, which falls on Thursday.
A tentative deal reached in last month's meeting saw Beijing agreeing to suspend for one year certain export restrictions on critical minerals.
China is hugely dominant in the mining and processing of rare earths, which are essential for sophisticated electronic components across a range of industries including auto, electronics and defence.
Under the deal reached by Trump and Xi, the United States will cut back tariffs on Chinese products, and Beijing will buy at least 12 million metric tons of American soybeans by the end of this year, and 25 million metric tons in 2026.
Xi told Trump on Monday that the "successful" meeting in South Korea "helped calibrate the course and inject momentum into the steady forward movement of the giant ship of China–US relations", Xinhua reported.
Since the meeting, China–US ties have "remained stable and have continued to improve, which has been widely welcomed by both countries and the international community", Xi added.
