Trump Open to Nvidia Selling Scaled-Back Blackwell Chip to China
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US President Donald Trump signaled on Monday that he'd be open to allowing Nvidia Corp. to sell a scaled-back version of its most advanced AI chip to China.
Trump said he would consider a deal that would allow Nvidia to ship its Blackwell chips to China if the company could design it to be less advanced. 'It's possible I'd make a deal' on a 'somewhat enhanced — in a negative way — Blackwell' processor, he said in a briefing with reporters. 'In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it.'
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China Urges Firms to Avoid Nvidia H20 Chips After Trump Resumes Sales
(Bloomberg) -- Beijing has urged local companies to avoid using Nvidia Corp.'s H20 processors, particularly for government-related purposes, complicating the chipmaker's return to China after the Trump administration reversed an effective US ban on such sales. Sunseeking Germans Face Swiss Backlash Over Alpine Holiday Congestion New York Warns of $34 Billion Budget Hole, Biggest Since 2009 Crisis To Head Off Severe Storm Surges, Nova Scotia Invests in 'Living Shorelines' Five Years After Black Lives Matter, Brussels' Colonial Statues Remain A New Stage for the Theater That Gave America Shakespeare in the Park Over the past few weeks, Chinese authorities have sent notices to a range of firms discouraging use of the less-advanced semiconductors, people familiar with the matter said. The guidance was particularly strong against the use of H20s for any government or national security-related work by state enterprises or private companies, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information is sensitive. The letters didn't, however, constitute an outright ban on H20 use, according to the people. Industry analysts broadly agree that Chinese companies still covet those chips, which perform quite well in certain crucial AI applications. President Donald Trump said Monday that the processor 'still has a market' in the Asian country despite also calling it 'obsolete.' Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. both recently secured Washington's approval to resume lower-end AI chip sales to China, on the controversial and legally questionable condition that they give the US government a 15% cut of the related revenue. But even with Trump's team on board, the two companies face the challenge that their Chinese customers are under Beijing's pressure to purchase domestic chips instead. Beijing's overall push affects AI accelerators from AMD in addition to Nvidia, one of the people said, though it's unclear whether any letters specifically mentioned AMD's MI308 chip. Shares of Chinese AI chip designer Cambricon Technologies Corp. surged to their daily limit of 20% on the news of China's guidance, leading a rally in peers such as Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. Beijing's stance could limit Trump's ability to turn his export control about-face into a windfall for government coffers, a deal that highlighted his administration's transactional approach to national security policies long treated as nonnegotiable. Still, Chinese companies may not be ready to jump ship to local semiconductors. 'Chips from domestic manufacturers are improving dramatically in quality, but they might not be as versatile for specific workloads that China's domestic AI industry hopes to focus on,' said Homin Lee, a senior macro strategist at Lombard Odier in Singapore. Lee added that he anticipates 'strong' demand for the chips the Trump administration is allowing Nvidia and AMD to sell. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Kevin Cassidy said he doesn't anticipate that Nvidia's processor sales to China will be affected because 'Chinese companies are going to want to use the best chips available.' Nvidia and AMD's chips are superior to local alternatives, he said. Beijing asked companies about that issue in some of its letters, according to one of the people, posing questions such as why they buy Nvidia H20 chips over local versions, whether that's a necessary choice given domestic options, and whether they've found any security concerns in the Nvidia hardware. The notices coincide with state media reports that cast doubt on the security and reliability of H20 processors. Chinese regulators have raised those concerns directly with Nvidia, which has repeatedly denied that its chips contain such vulnerabilities. The Financial Times reported that some Chinese companies are planning to decrease orders of Nvidia chips in response to the letters. Right now, the people said, China's most stringent chip guidance is limited to sensitive applications, a situation that bears similarities to the way Beijing restricted Tesla Inc. vehicles and Apple Inc. iPhones in certain institutions and locations over security concerns. China's government also at one point barred the use of Micron Technology Inc. chips in critical infrastructure. It's possible that Beijing may extend its heavier-handed Nvidia and AMD guidance to a wider range of settings, according to one person with direct knowledge of the deliberations, who said that those conversations are in early stages. AMD declined to comment on Beijing's notices, while Nvidia said in a statement that 'the H20 is not a military product or for government infrastructure.' China has ample supplies of domestic chips, Nvidia said, and 'won't and never has relied on American chips for government operations.' China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Cyberspace Administration of China didn't respond to faxed requests for comment on this story, which is based on interviews with more than a half-dozen people familiar with Beijing's policy discussions. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment. The Chinese government's posture raises questions about the Trump administration's explanation for why the US is allowing those exports mere months after effectively banning such sales. Multiple senior US officials have said their policy reversal was the result of trade talks with China, but Beijing has publicly indicated that the resumed H20 shipments weren't part of any bilateral deal. China's recent notices to companies suggest that the Asian country may not have sought such a concession from Washington in the first place. Beijing's concerns are twofold. For starters, Chinese officials are worried that Nvidia chips could have location-tracking and remote-shutdown capabilities — a suggestion that Nvidia has vehemently denied. Trump officials are actively exploring whether location tracking could be used to help curtail suspected smuggling of restricted components into China, and lawmakers have introduced a bill that would require location verification for advanced AI chips. Second, Beijing is intensely focused on developing its domestic chip capabilities, and wants Chinese companies to shift away from Western chips in favor of local offerings. Officials have previously urged Chinese firms to choose domestic semiconductors over Nvidia H20 processors, Bloomberg reported last September, and have introduced energy efficiency standards that the H20 chip doesn't meet. Nvidia designed the H20 chip specifically for Chinese customers to abide by years of US restrictions on sales of its more advanced hardware, curbs designed to limit Beijing's access to AI that could benefit the Chinese military. The H20 chip has less computational power than Nvidia's top offerings, but its strong memory bandwidth is quite well suited to the inference stage of AI development, when models recognize patterns and draw conclusions. That's made it a desirable product to companies like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. in China, where domestic chip champion Huawei Technologies Co. is struggling to produce enough advanced components to meet market demand. By one estimate from Biden officials — who considered but did not implement controls on H20 sales — losing access to that Nvidia chip would make it three to six times more expensive for Chinese companies to run inference on advanced AI models. 'Beijing appears to be using regulatory uncertainty to create a captive market sufficiently sized to absorb Huawei's supply, while still allowing purchases of H20s to meet actual demands,' said Lennart Heim, an AI-focused researcher at RAND, of China's push for companies to avoid American AI chips. 'This signals that domestic alternatives remain inadequate even as China pressures foreign suppliers.' In his remarks Monday, Trump said China's Huawei already offers chips comparable to the Nvidia H20, echoing previous remarks by officials in his administration who've defended the decision to resume H20 exports partly on those grounds. The US should keep the Chinese AI ecosystem reliant on less-advanced American technology for as long as possible, these officials say, in order to deprive Huawei of the revenue and know-how that would come from a broader customer base. Other administration officials have strongly objected to that logic, Bloomberg has reported, arguing that resuming H20 exports will only embolden China's tech champions and bolster the country's overall computing power. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and other Trump officials have also claimed that the H20 move was part of a deal to improve American access to Chinese rare-earth minerals — despite the Trump team's previous assertions that such an arrangement wasn't on the table. 'As the Chinese deliver their magnets, then the H20s will come off,' Lutnick said last month. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in late July that the magnet issue had been 'solved.' The first Nvidia H20 and AMD MI308 licenses arrived a bit over a week after Bessent's declaration — after Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang met with the president and both companies agreed to share their China revenue with the US government. --With assistance from Yanping Li, Sangmi Cha and Emily Forgash. (Updates with additional analyst commentary in ninth paragraph.) Why It's Actually a Good Time to Buy a House, According to a Zillow Economist Bessent on Tariffs, Deficits and Embracing Trump's Economic Plan The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results The Game Starts at 8. The Robbery Starts at 8:01 Klarna Cashed In on 'Buy Now, Pay Later.' Now It Wants to Be a Bank ©2025 Bloomberg L.P. 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Yahoo
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"America, You Are In Grave Danger": The Internet Is VERY Worried About Donald Trump's Disturbing Latest Move
The American public has grown increasingly concerned about President Donald Trump's moves toward authoritarianism and autocracy as he positions himself as being above the law and frequently mentions not leaving office at the end of his Constitutionally-granted second and final term. During a press conference on Monday morning, Trump announced a sweeping plan by his administration to increase its control over law enforcement in the United States capital city of Washington, DC. Washington, DC, is the capital city and the federal district of the US, but is not an incorporated state or part of one. Jurisdiction over DC belongs to Congress. He started the press conference with a comment on how crowded the room is, saying they need a ballroom instead. Attorney General Pam Bondi grinned along. Trump launches into the topic of the press conference. "And we're here for a very serious purpose. Very serious purpose. Something is out of control, but we're gonna put it in control very quickly, like we did on the southern border," he said. "I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor. And worse." Related: "This is Liberation Day in DC, and we're gonna take our capital back," Trump said. "We're taking it back." He announced his plan: "Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I'm officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act — you know what that is — and placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control." "In addition, I'm deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order, and public safety in Washington, DC and they're gonna be allowed to do their job properly," Trump continued. He then directly addressed the journalists in the room about the supposed crime hotbed of DC, saying, "You people are victims of it, too." President Trump then said that "The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth," as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nodded along. "The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled," Trump said. "Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever." "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people. And we're not gonna let it happen anymore. We're not gonna take it," Trump told the crowd. He then repeated that the problem would be treated like the southern border, which he said "nobody comes to" anymore. For clarity, the Justice Department reported early this year that violent crime in Washington, DC, is down 35% from 2023. According to the DC Metropolitan Police Department, the very agency that Trump is seeking to federalize, violent crime is currently down 26% year-over-year. "We are not experiencing a spike in crime," DC mayor Muriel Bowser told MSNBC on Sunday. "In fact, we're watching our crime numbers go down." Related: Richard Stengel, author and former government official under President Barack Obama, said that, "Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover." People quickly hopped on Reddit's r/politics to discuss the CNBC article about Trump's announcement (you can watch the full press conference here). This is what some of the over 3,000 commenters had to say: 1."Federalizing the DC Police under fake numbers... Literally watching fascism unfold before our eyes, people. It's past time to get pissed." —thedrizztman 2."I thought he said he couldn't deploy the National Guard on January 6? So now we know he could have, but didn't because it was his people." —swiftfoot_hiker 3."This is the big red flashing sign of fascism for anyone still wondering." —ImperatorUniversum1 Related: 4."Every word out of this MF'er's mouth is a LIE. EVERY WORD. Taking over DC is to keep protestors out because this administration's next actions will be brutal." —mhouse2001 5."Martial law in motion. MF didn't even bother to stage a Reichstag fire." —alloutofchewingum 6."Here we fucking go. And sweet Jesus, it's only August of year one..." —KingMario05 7."This is the death of the republic we're watching. Temporary takeovers have a very long history of becoming permanent. We're so fucked." —Violent_Mud_Butt 8."So, he could have done this to put down the insurrection at the Capitol?" —aeppelcyning 9."This is a pretext for something. His excuse is the homeless — what I really think he's preparing for are protests or maybe even riots. Maybe connected to the upcoming 'peace talks' with Russia, or the Epstein scandal." —rainghost 10."So that's it. No more freedom or rule of law in the US. And all the flag-waving Trump supporters don't care. Not a peep from them." —Large-Phase9732 11."So I assume DC residents won't be able to vote ever again." —V_T_H Related: 12."Full fucking stop. Yes, this is a distraction attempt from Epstein, among other things, but this is a pilot program for doing this in other major cities around America. This is the next step in a full fascist takeover of this country. But hey, eggs are... I mean, gas is... I mean, Kamala's laugh." —spqr2001 13."We are going to find out if the military is going to uphold their oath to defend us from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Trump is the biggest domestic terrorist I've seen in this country in my lifetime." —Ol_Turd_Fergy 14."That's it folks. Democracy in the US is now over. What a shameful country." —boringfantasy 15."Authoritarianism it is then, I guess." —Jonny_Segment 16."Correct me if I'm wrong, but I could have sworn that Trump had no authority to do this. I mean, that's what he said for January 6. He said that the Speaker of the House needs to make this call. Could he have been lying?" —dydski 17."Is this about homeless people? What is this about? Those National Guard are gonna be real sad when they realize a ton of the homeless individuals they are arresting are vets." —Resident_Standard437 finally, "America, you are in grave danger. An authoritarian is seizing power over the police, based on a made-up emergency. This is a precursor to stealing the elections. It's the only thing left between them and ruling forever. They are stealing our democracy and do not plan to give it back. And all of you are silent. The republic is dying, rapidly and right before our eyes, and nothing is being done to stop it." —kevendo So, what do you think? Let us know in the comments. Also in In the News: Also in In the News: Also in In the News:
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Anthropic's Claude AI model can now handle longer prompts
Anthropic is increasing the amount of information that enterprise customers can send to Claude in a single prompt, part of an effort to attract more developers to the company's popular AI coding models. For Anthropic's API customers, the company's Claude Sonnet 4 AI model now has a one million token context window — meaning the AI can handle requests as long as 750,000 words, more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, or 75,000 lines of code. That's roughly five times Claude's previous limit (200,000 tokens), and more than double the 400,000 token context window offered by OpenAI's GPT-5. Long context will also be available for Claude Sonnet 4 through Anthropic's cloud partners, including on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Anthropic has built one of the largest enterprise businesses among AI model developers, largely by selling Claude to AI coding platforms such as Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, and Anysphere's Cursor. While Claude has become the model of choice among developers, GPT-5 may threaten Anthropic's dominance with its competitive pricing and strong coding performance. Anysphere CEO Michael Truell even helped OpenAI announce the launch of GPT-5, which is now the default AI model for new users in Cursor. Anthropic's product lead for the Claude platform, Brad Abrams, told TechCrunch in an interview that he expects AI coding platforms to get a 'lot of benefit' from this update. When asked if GPT-5 put a dent in Claude's API usage, Abrams downplayed the concern, saying he's 'really happy with the API business and the way it's been growing.' Whereas OpenAI generates most of its revenue from consumer subscriptions to ChatGPT, Anthropic's business centers around selling AI models to enterprises through an API. That's made AI coding platforms a key customer for Anthropic, and could be why the company is throwing in some new perks to attract users in the face of GPT-5. Last week, Anthropic unveiled an updated version of its largest AI model, Claude Opus 4.1, which pushed the company's AI coding capabilities a bit further. Generally speaking, AI models tend to perform better on all tasks when they have more context, but especially for software engineering problems. For example, if you ask an AI model to spin up a new feature for your app, it's likely to do a better job if it can see the entire project, rather than just a small section. Abrams also told TechCrunch that Claude's large context window also helps it perform better at long agentic coding tasks, in which the AI model is autonomously working on a problem for minutes or hours. With a large context window, Claude can remember all its previous steps in long-horizon tasks. But some companies have taken large context windows to an extreme, claiming their AI models can process massive prompts. Google offers a 2 million token context window for Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Meta offers a 10 million token context window for Llama 4 Scout. Some studies suggest there's a limit to how large context windows can be, and AI models are not great at processing massive prompts. Abrams said that Anthropic's research team focused on increasing not just the context window for Claude, but the 'effective context window,' suggesting that its AI can understand most of the information it's given. However, he declined to reveal Anthropic's exact techniques. When prompts to Claude Sonnet 4 are over 200,000 tokens, Anthropic will charge more to API users, at $6 per million input tokens and $22.50 per million output tokens (up from $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens).
