President Donald Trump‘s administration is asking Americans and international allies of the United States to make sacrifices. Trump, trying to fulfill his longtime promise of fighting the Chinese Communist Party‘s existential threat, has imposed the highest tariff rates in a century on U.S. consumers and pressured allies to wrap up wars against Russia and Iranian proxies, lest they lose U.S. military support.
Some of these sacrifices, such as insisting that NATO allies fulfill their legal obligation to increase their defense spending, are not just noble but wildly overdue. Others, such as the quartertrillion-dollar tariff bill charged to Americans, are a much more onerous tax.
But the whole point of Trump’s national security project, from the untested mercantilist economics to the very real threat of abandoning Ukraine, was supposed to serve the greater good of challenging the CCP. Instead, Trump allowed Nvidia to cash out and cater to the Chinese, exchanging short-term private profit for long-term global peril.
After a lengthy lobbying effort by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to allow the AI chip industry leader to export its H200 semiconductors to China, Trump finally gave the green light to the $4.4 trillion tech giant, with the stipulation that the U.S. government gets 25% of the sales.
While the H200 chips are not Nvidia’s most advanced, they are a generation ahead of the intentionally dumbed-down H20 chips that were the only kind Nvidia was allowed to export to China. Again, with the caveat that the Trump administration grossed a 15% cut of the sales.
Morgan Stanley estimated that the performance of the H20 chips is 75% lower than that of the H200 chips. The Institute for Progress clocked the strength of the H200 chips as nearly six times greater than that of the H20 chips. In layman’s terms, China’s access to the H200 chips will immediately transform its AI landscape, and the national security ramifications could prove disastrous.
It is exceedingly rare for Republicans to loudly break ranks with Trump’s personal policy declarations and rarer still for the party’s classic foreign policy hawks to concur with its more “national conservative” isolationists. But that is how disastrous objective observers understand Trump’s decision. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pledged to oppose the export allowance if it will accelerate the CCP’s military capabilities (which it 100% will). Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) warned that to beat the technologically “parasitic” CCP in the AI race, “we need to constrain their ability to leverage our own technology” and thus “reduce their access to our hardware, not increase it.”
If Trump cannot heed the advice of fellow party members, perhaps he should consider his administration.
In the announcement of the arrest of traffickers illegally exporting H200 chips to China, the Trump Justice Department called these specific semiconductors “the building blocks of AI superiority and are integral to modern military applications.”
“The country that controls these chips will control AI technology; the country that controls AI technology will control the future,” the DOJ continued on the same day Trump legalized the export of the chips.
It’s easy to see why the Trump administration would allow Nvidia to make sales in China. A record two-thirds of Americans are invested in the stock market. The tech giants of the “Magnificent 7” are currently fueling the entirety of the stock market’s bull run, with Nvidia the single most important stock in the game.
But even if this were all about the short-term prosperity of U.S. citizens, the markets don’t love this decision. Nvidia’s stock tumbled nearly 4% from the Dec. 8 closing bell through the few days, compared to the 32% increase that came in the year-to-date before it. Investors understand that Nvidia is uniquely valuable because it stands as our greatest weapon against the Chinese.
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By opening up its advanced chips to the Chinese market, Nvidia is not just undermining its own usefulness in an existential war; it’s practically handing the CCP the blueprint for doing what it does best in the form of IP theft. As Hawley correctly noted, the “parasitic” CCP only steals America’s technological advances. It cannot meaningfully create its own.
It’s all fine and good to tell the Ukrainians that they have months, not years, to secure a peace with Russia before the U.S. shuts off aid if that’s what it takes for us to cement our dominance in the South Pacific. If small businesses are told they must shutter so that we may throttle Chinese access to global markets, Trump could try and make the argument that it’s a small price to pay. But allowing Nvidia to sell the CCP its military’s future means we have sold out America. And none of the sacrifices will ever be worth it.