U.S. President Donald Trump's growing prioritization of trade issues over technology matters could enable China to close the gap with the United States on developing AI systems, and will embolden Beijing to seek relaxed export controls that would help it on the AI hardware side of the industry, not just software and services. The United States' two leading graphics processing unit (GPU) designers, AMD and Nvidia, have agreed to pay the government 15% of their revenue made from sales in China of certain advanced AI-focused chips as part of a deal for the U.S. Commerce Department to approve export licenses for sales of such chips, including Nvidia's H20 and AMD's MI308 AI accelerator chips. The approval of exports of the H20 accelerator was unsurprising as Nvidia announced on July 14 that the Trump administration had agreed to approve shipments of the H20 and MI308 chips, which it blocked in April,...
