Alice Han

Last week, President Trump announced that he was reversing a years-long policy banning US chip makers from selling their powerful AI chips to China.

In a social media post, Trump indicated that Nvidia would be allowed to sell their H200 chips in China, the second most powerful AI chips the company makes.

This marks a major shift in policy and implicates the whole AI industry as the engine driving the global economy, as well as putting a spotlight on the ongoing tensions between the US and China.

Joining me to talk through all of this is Chris Miller.

He is a professor of international history at Tufts University and is the author of the critically acclaimed 2022 book, Chip War, The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology.

Chris, there's nobody better to speak on this topic.

So thank you so much for joining me today on China Decode.

Let's start with the export controls and how that we've seen a major shift.

Certainly, people who have been watching this closely are disheartened to some extent with Trump relaxing on H200s.

But maybe from the ground up, can you walk us through why this actually matters and why this has been a big shift to, say, go from the H20s, where he relaxed, to the H200s?

What is the quantum leap, so to speak, between the two?

And why is he issuing this policy shift?

Because to my mind, he was really the first to issue this clarion call in his first Trump administration about the need to do export controls.

This year, I think we've seen a move towards being dovish on some of these chips issues.

And certainly people point to David Sachs being the crypto and AISR as being one proponent of this.

But what is the rationale from Trump's perspective in basically reducing these export controls?

And to grab onto that second point that you mentioned, do you think it's plausible, that argument?

Because to my mind, at least, people who follow the Chinese chip industry are saying that this could actually give China more of an edge in the broader AI competition.

Certainly, it raises China's compute capabilities and it reduces the gap between the U.S.

and China on compute alone.