Trade experts express concern about reported deal linking exports controls to monetary payments.
Nvidia and AMD have agreed to give the United States government a share of revenues from chip sales in China as part of a deal to secure export licences for their products, the White House confirmed.
Under the agreement reached with US President Donald Trump’s administration, Nvidia will share 15 percent of revenues from sales of its H20 AI chip, while AMD will pay the same percentage of MI308 chip revenues.
Speaking to reporters at the White House on Monday, Trump said that China already has Nvidia’s H20 chip – calling it “old” and “obsolete”.
After targeting the chip for export restrictions, Trump said he negotiated a deal with the president and CEO of Nvidia, Jenson Huang.
“He’s selling essentially an old chip,” said Trump. “I said, if I’m going to do that, I want you to pay us as a country something, because I’m giving you a release. I released them only from the H20.”
The unorthodox agreement, which has no known precedent, comes after the Trump administration last month agreed to reverse a ban on the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China.
The Financial Times, which first reported the news, said the Trump administration had yet to decide how it would use the collected revenues.
AMD did not respond to a request for comment.
Nvidia neither confirmed nor denied the deal, but said it follows US government rules for doing business in overseas markets.
“While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide,” a company spokesperson said.
“America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America’s AI tech stack can be the world’s standard if we race.”
Following reports of the deal, which was confirmed by The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, trade experts expressed concern about the implications of linking controls on sensitive technology to monetary payments.
Christopher Padilla, the former head of the US Commerce Department’s International Trade Administration, called the agreement “astonishing”.
“If the Trump administration is allowing companies to buy their way past export controls imposed to protect US national security, we are in very dangerous waters,” Padilla said in a post on LinkedIn.
“A mix of bribery and blackmail that is certainly unprecedented and possibly illegal.”
Peter Harrell, a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the deal set a worrying precedent.
“The Chinese would pay a lot for F35s and advanced US military technology, too,” Harrell said in a post on X.
“Regardless of whether you think Nvidia should be able to sell H20s in China, charging a fee in exchange for relaxing national security export controls is a terrible precedent.”