Don’t Feed the Beast: America Should Not Be Sending H200 Chips to China

Recent reports suggest the Trump administration is considering a request by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to ease export controls in order to sell more advanced Artificial Intelligence chips to China. Specifically, Huang is lobbying the White House to permit Nvidia to sell China significant quantities of its H200 chip. This would be a colossal mistake.

The H200 chip is far more powerful than the best chips China can manufacture today and is several times more powerful than the best chips China can legally purchase from the U.S. today.

The Heritage Foundation has been a strong supporter of export controls on advanced chip sales to China, calling on the U.S. government to “limit Chinese access to advanced technology with dual-use applications” in our landmark paper on the New Cold War in 2023.

In an October 2025 article for the Washington Examiner, Bryan Burack and I argued that it “makes little strategic sense to invigorate China’s AI industry, which is starved of computing resources, at a time when U.S. AI firms are hungry for more. Doing so would only help China build superior AI models, globalize Chinese AI products to compete with the U.S. ‘AI stack,’ and aid China’s military modernization.”

Export controls need to be carefully monitored for effectiveness. China has already spent countless billions evading existing U.S. export controls and enforcement must be strengthened. On the other hand, if China is able to develop competitive substitutes for U.S. chips at comparable scale and reliability, export controls will have to be reevaluated and updated.

In the long run, the AI race will be won by the side that is most successful at protecting its technological edge while simultaneously innovating and winning global market share. As the AI Action plan states, “Whoever has the largest AI ecosystem will set global standards and reap economic and military benefits.”

For now, the United States is winning the AI race. Selling China large quantities of H200 chips would give America’s top adversary something it vitally needs to catch, and potentially surpass, the U.S. The leaders of China’s AI industry have repeatedly admitted that their principal constraint is compute capacity and high bandwidth memory; we should take them at their word.

The Trump administration’s own AI Action Plan rightly argues: “Denying our foreign adversaries access to [advanced AI compute] is a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security.” 

We trust President Donald Trump will make the right decision and deny H200 sales to China.

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