Nvidia and AMD reportedly agree to pay 15% of China chip sale revenues to US
The revenue share applies to Nvidia's H20 chips and AMD's MI308 chips, the report said, citing a US official, noting that the Trump administration had yet to determine how to use the money.
The chipmakers agreed to the quid pro quo arrangement as a condition for obtaining export licenses for the Chinese market that were granted last week, according to the unnamed official.
According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licenses, the newspaper reported. But Donald Trump has encouraged firms, and countries, to make investments in the US to, in his words, 'buy down' the tariff rates he imposes.
Nvidia follows rules the US government sets for its participation in worldwide markets, an Nvidia spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed statement. 'While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.'
AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The US commerce department started issuing licenses to Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China last week, removing a significant hurdle to the artificial intelligence bellwether's access to a key market.
The US in July reversed an April ban on the sale of the H20 chip to China. The company had tailored the microprocessor specially to the Chinese market to comply with the Biden-era AI chip export controls.
Nvidia's chips are a major driver of the AI boom, and in July the company became the first ever to have its market value surpass $4tn.
Complications facing the company are not necessarily over, however, with growing scrutiny of Nvidia by Chinese authorities. Late last month China's cyberspace watchdog summoned Nvidia to a meeting to discuss whether the chips had any 'backdoor' security risks which would allow remote access or control. Nvidia said they did not.
But Chinese state media has continued to raise concerns. In a commentary earlier this month, the People's Daily said Nvidia must produce 'convincing security proofs' to eliminate Chinese users' worries over security risks in its chips and regain market trust. And On Sunday a state media account on Chinese social media platform WeChat said the H20 chips posed a security risk for China. The account, Yuyuan Tantian, claimed Nvidia chips could achieve functions including 'remote shutdown' through a hardware 'backdoor'. Nvidia has not responded.
With Reuters
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
.jpg%3Ftrim%3D0%2C50%2C0%2C50%26width%3D1200%26height%3D800%26crop%3D1200%3A800&w=3840&q=100)
The Independent
3 minutes ago
- The Independent
Epstein story has become a ‘nothingburger,' data expert says
Weeks after being flabbergasted over the amount of interest the American public was showing in Jeffrey Epstein and the Trump administration's botched handling of the investigation into the deceased sex offender, CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten now claims the issue is 'quickly becoming something of a nothingburger.' Vice President JD Vance unwittingly sparked a new wave of calls to release the so-called 'Epstein Files' when he attempted to mock Democrats 'who are now all of a sudden so interested' in the case during a Sunday interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. 'For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did absolutely nothing about this story. We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires,' Vance declared. 'And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.' Vance's suggestion that Democrats are complicit in Epstein's crimes prompted a number of pundits to say this is precisely why more documents should be made public. On CNN Monday morning, Enten was asked to weigh in on what he's 'seeing in the numbers' about the Epstein saga. 'I would say that this is, from at least a political point of view, quickly turning into a dud of a story,' Enten said on CNN News Central, causing anchor Kate Bolduan to remark how 'wild' it was that interest had fallen off. 'Take a look here. Google searches for Epstein down 89 percent versus just three weeks ago. Falling through the floor,' an animated Ented exclaimed. 'It is no longer the top term searched alongside Donald Trump's name – that's been trading off between tariffs and Vladimir Putin, with obviously the meeting coming up later this week.' He added: 'But at this particular point, the American people's interest in this story – it's quickly becoming something of a nothingburger!' Bolduan then asked Enten about the president's polling and if it had taken a hit following uproar over the Justice Department's conclusion last month that Epstein died by suicide and had 'no client list' that incriminated other prominent figures, which resulted in public criticism from high-profile MAGA supporters. 'Trump's approval rating in July of 2025, it was 45 percent. It's still well within that margin of error here at 44 percent,' Enten stated, referencing his own aggregate of pollsters. 'And you compare that to where he was in his first term at this point. He was at 37 percent. So he's seven points higher. Very much in a different political universe now, significantly higher in terms of his overall approval rating than he was at this point in his first term.' Noting that the president's approval among Republican voters remains around 90 percent, Enten said that despite the initial MAGA furor over the Epstein case, the president 'hasn't lost any of that base.' Therefore, in the CNN data expert's opinion, Trump's poll numbers appear to be riding high, at least comparatively speaking. 'And when it comes to that center of the electorate, he's basically holding on there. And his overall approval rating of 44 percent is pretty gosh darn good for him, considering where he was at this point in term number one,' Enten asserted. (CNN's 'poll of polls,' meanwhile, has Trump at 42 percent.) Turning to the most recent CNN survey, Enten then observed that when asked to name the nation's top issue, only a single respondent said it was the Epstein case, suggesting that it was further proof that the story itself had petered out. 'So yes, there used to be a lot of interest in this story,' he said. 'But the bottom line is that even amongst those who had a high interest in this story, it wasn't something that they thought was all that important. And as I said at the beginning, the interest in this story has fallen off the table.' Bolduan, meanwhile, called it 'incongruous' that the public no longer seemed to care about the Epstein files after the amount of attention the issue had received from both Capitol Hill and the president's supporters, leading Enten to heap praise on Trump. 'I would just say this. Donald Trump has some of the best political instincts of any politician I've seen,' he concluded. 'And on this particular issue, you see it full well and clear because he has been saying, 'You know what? This is not an issue.' And it turns out that a lot of the American public actually seem to agree with him.' After the meltdown among conservatives over the DOJ's Epstein memo, which came on the heels of Attorney General Pam Bondi insinuating that she was in possession of the so-called 'client list' and promising to release more documents in the case, Trump ordered his supporters to ignore the issue and claimed it was a 'hoax.' While pro-Trump networks like Fox News quickly followed suit and downplayed the Epstein story, the issue still remained front and center despite the administration's attempts to distract the public with wild allegations about the Obama administration committing treason with the 2016 Russia election interference investigation. In the weeks following the DOJ memo, the Wall Street Journal published a bombshell story about Trump sending Epstein, his onetime friend, a 'bawdy' birthday sketch in 2003 which reportedly read: 'Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.' The president denied creating the card, and filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the WSJ and its owner Rupert Murdoch. The WSJ's report gave MAGA the opportunity to reunite in its shared hatred of the mainstream media, and right-wing fury over the lack of transparency in the Epstein case began to subside, despite subsequent reporting that Trump was informed by Bondi in May that his name appeared in the Epstein files, along with many other high-profile people. Last month Trump denied Bondi had told him that he appears in the Epstein files. The president has never been formally accused or charged with a crime in connection with Epstein. Meanwhile, the conservative media ecosphere has been on a two-week-long outrage cycle over Hollywood star Sydney Sweeney's 'good jeans' American Eagle ad, which has seen Fox News devote hours more coverage to the supposed liberal anger over the commercial than to the Epstein drama. As for Enten, he has seen his stock rise with the commander-in-chief in recent weeks, perhaps because he said earlier this month that he couldn't 'think of a more influential president during this century' than Trump. While butchering the CNN data guru's name during an interview with CNBC, Trump pushed back on comments about his slumping poll numbers by urging the hosts to check out Enten's analysis. 'If you check out CNN tomorrow, watch Harry Emden and you'll see about the numbers,' Trump exclaimed, falsely claiming recent surveys placed him at 71 percent approval. To his credit, Enten reacted to the unexpected presidential name-check by debunking Trump's claims about his polling and explaining that the president's approval numbers are at near-historic lows for a second-term president.
BBC News
4 minutes ago
- BBC News
AOL ends dial-up internet service after more than 30 years
AOL is shutting down the dial-up service that introduced homes across the US to the offering, which connects to the internet via a phone line, launched more than 30 years ago and was known for its chirpy whirring start-up sound, memorialised in the 1998 film You've Got Mail. But it has long since been eclipsed by faster alternatives. Fewer than 300,000 people in the US reported having only a dial-up internet connection, compared with more than 300 million with broadband service, according to 2023 government estimates. "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet, " the company said in a notice to subscribers in the US and Canada on Friday. The service will no longer be available in AOL plans as of 30 September, the firm added."Thanks for the memories RIP," wrote AOL co-founder Steve Case, who presided over the firm's growth in the company was known for luring customers by mailing them free trial discs and at one point claimed ownership of nearly 40% of the time that Americans spent which merged with Time Warner in 2000 in a deal widely deemed disastrous, boasted more than 30 million subscribers at the end of its lead had already started to be eroded, as broadband offerings from rivals started to gain traction. As early as 2003, obituaries for dial-up service had begun, as in a Wall Street Journal article that declared: "It's official. Dial-up is dying."In the UK, AOL was toppled from the top spot as internet service provider in Warner spun off AOL in 2009. It was acquired by Verizon in 2015, which saw value in its mobile technology business and later merged it with Yahoo. Today, AOL and Yahoo are owned by Apollo Global.
The Guardian
16 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Why Peak China may finally have arrived
Proclamations about the inevitability of China's dominance of the global economic system, or the so-called Chinese century, were made long before Donald Trump's attempts to stymie its trade with the US. Common concerns about coercive politics and human rights aside, some notions of China as an unstoppable economic, technological and military behemoth sit alongside others focused more on an increasingly sclerotic, over- centralised political economy, that depends on wasteful economic stimulus, and features poor governance and institutions. The fusion of these notions suggests that we may already have reached 'peak China'. At the time of the 2008 financial crisis, China's official, and probably exaggerated, GDP was about $14tn (£10.4tn), or about a third of that of the US. By 2021, it had risen to three-quarters of America's $23.7tn, and there was widespread talk about in which year of the 2020s China would overtake the US. By 2024, however, China's $18tn economy had fallen back to just over 62% of the almost $30tn of the US. In GDP per head terms, China is still no more than 20% of the US. A rising China uniquely lifted its share of global GDP between 2000 and 2021 from 3.5% to 18.5%, but since then it has slipped back to about 16.5%. There is no question that China's rise is at least stalling. The working age and total population are now in relentless decline. The urbanisation rate, just over 60%, is flattening out. Productivity growth has stalled. The long surge in China's share of global manufacturing exports and production has levelled off, and the external environment for China is now much harder and more hostile. A 90-day pause in the US-China tariff war is due to expire on Tuesday, and it is unclear whether it will be extended. Part of the problem is that China has reached the end of extrapolation. The past really is another country. Some of its growth engines could only ever fire once: for example, enrolling children in primary and secondary schools; improving basic healthcare; reaping the demographic dividend of falling dependency rates; and moving people from the countryside to higher-productivity, urban jobs. Some growth also flowed from a number of highly effective policy initiatives such as those captured by the era of reform and opening-up, inspired by Deng Xiaoping: joining the World Trade Organization; creating a genuine market in housing, and exploiting globalisation. None of these can happen again. China's growth model, moreover, based on unrealistically high growth targets and uniquely high investment and savings rates, is becoming swamped by stagnant productivity, debt service difficulties and misallocation of capital. At the Central Economic Work Conference in December last year, China's premier, Li Qiang, summarised his country's condition by saying candidly that the foundation for sustained economic recovery and growth was not strong, demand was weak, and there were pressures on job creation and 'fiscal difficulties' among several local governments. Although consumption has been made a top priority, actual policy measures to make it so have been underwhelming, partly because redistributing economic power to companies and citizens also entails changes in political power, which are anathema to the Communist party. The structural downturn in the property sector, which at one stage accounted for more than a quarter of the economy, is likely to shrink for the foreseeable future, dogged by lower rates of household formation and smaller cohorts of first-time buyers, linked to demographics as well as a chronic oversupply of unsold and uncompleted real estate. The government has softened its approach to private enterprises and approved a new private economy promotion law to bolster AI, technology clusters and hubs, and reduce regulatory barriers. Low business confidence, though, is not really about regulations but about political interference, and weak demand and profits. The super-globalisation from which China benefited is pretty much over, and the world's biggest export nation is now confronted by a fragmenting and fracturing trade and investment environment in which commerce within blocs is holding up better than trade between them. China's bloc includes a majority of the world's population, but very small proportions of world GDP, investment and wealth. At the same time, developed and middle-income economies, as well as emerging nations, are pushing back against what they perceive to be predatory trade policies by a mercantilist China. Peak China does not stem from doubts about China's industrial prowess and pedigree. It is, though, about two things that can be simultaneously true: China can have world-class companies and trendsetters such as Alibaba, Tencent, BYD, CATL, Huawei and DeepSeek, as well as an economy with systemic imbalances, debt capacity limits, and political and economic contradictions. Put another way, China has islands of technological excellence and leadership in a sea of macroeconomic turbulence and trouble. This characterised Peak Japan 40 years ago, and China is shaping up for the encore. George Magnus is a research associate at Oxford University's China Centre and at Soas University of London. He is the author of Red Flags: Why Xi's China is in Jeopardy
