Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company,covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, I’m focusing on Nvidia’s up-and-down fortunes stemming from Jensen Huang’s close relationship with Trump. I also look at some reported infighting over AI at Meta, and at the reasons for data centers in space.
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China may not want (many) Nvidia H200 chips after all
Nvidia appeared to have scored a major coup when President Trump on Monday wrote on Truth Social that the U.S. government would allow the sale of its powerful H200 AI chips to China. Previously, the chip company lobbied its way to an approval to sell its older and weaker H20 chip in China—the world’s second-largest economy and a hotbed of AI and robotics research—but President Xi Jinping told Chinese firms not to buy them, citing security reasons.
The administration’s favor to Nvidia came with some conditions. The U.S. would get a 25% cut of the Chinese sales, and the chips would undergo a “security review” before their export. And Nvidia’s most powerful chips, the Blackwell GPU, would remain banned from export to China. But Nvidia still stood to make a lot of money selling the H200s.
Now reports say that the Chinese government plans to restrict the import of the H200s, allowing only a small set of trusted Chinese companies or research organizations to get them. Reuters reports that Alibaba and ByteDance want to order H200s but are waiting for a final decision from the Chinese government.
Xi wants Chinese companies to use chips from domestic companies such as Huawei, which could help the Chinese chip companies catch up with Nvidia in a technological sense. The Information reports that the Chinese government sees the H200s as a “stopgap” solution in the meantime. The Chinese also have serious concerns about the security of the H200s, amplified no doubt by the chance that agents of the U.S. government might install security backdoors or location tracking codes in the chips during the security review.
