Only a few years ago, the Biden administration declared export controls a “new strategic asset” to help the US maintain “as large a lead as possible” over China in advanced technology. President Donald Trump is now upending that approach.

But Nvidia now says that Trump, having met personally with Huang, is promising to issue those licenses, which would enable Chinese AI companies to greatly accelerate model development and infrastructure buildout. And even though the H100 chips are officially still supposed to be off-limits, China may be able to get its hands on them as well.

The US has given chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD the opportunity to sell their chips to China again. Derrick Irwin, portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, says the US may have retain some dominance,

President Donald Trump has dialed down his confrontational tone with China in an effort to secure a summit with counterpart Xi Jinping and a trade deal with the world’s second-largest economy, people familiar with internal deliberations said.