Athira Sethu
Kochi, 3 Nov 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump said that Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips will not be sold to China or any other country but will be sold to U.S. companies only. In a recorded interview broadcast on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and in comments aboard Air Force One, Trump said that only U.S. customers would have access to Nvidia’s top-of-the-line Blackwell chips. Nvidia, currently the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization, manufactures such state-of-the-art semiconductors.
“The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” Trump said, reaffirming to reporters as he headed back to Washington from Florida. “We don’t give the Blackwell chip to other people,” he said on the flight.
That would imply that Trump might put tighter restrictions on the export of cutting-edge American AI chips than U.S. officials had previously indicated-including potentially blocking China and other countries from acquiring state-of-the-art semiconductors.
In July, the Trump administration rolled out a new AI strategy that would loosen environmental regulations and vastly expand AI exports to allied nations, hoping to keep U.S. technology strides ahead of China’s.
Just last Friday, Nvidia announced it would supply over 260,000 Blackwell AI chips to South Korea, including to major companies like Samsung Electronics.
Trump also discussed the idea of approving an export license for a less sophisticated version of the Blackwell chip to be sold to China, an idea he first floated in August. While he ruled out permitting sales of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Chinese companies, he did not rule out the possibility of selling a scaled-down version of the chip. “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced,” he said in the interview on “60 Minutes.”
This potential sale of any type of Blackwell chips to China has been met with concerned outrage from U.S. lawmakers, especially from critics who say it could further enhance China’s military and AI capabilities. Representative John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, likened such a move to “giving Iran weapons-grade uranium.”
Trump had considered raising the matter of the chips with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their summit in South Korea last week, but later confirmed that the subject did not come up. Its chief, Jensen Huang, said Nvidia had not sought U.S. export licenses for shipment to China because Beijing had indicated it would refuse them. “They’ve made it very clear that they don’t want Nvidia to be there right now,” he told a developers’ event, adding that Nvidia still needs the Chinese market to finance its U.S. research and development.
