President Trump has been all over the AI chipmaking news recently, what with his appearance at the Washington AI summit late last month and his granting of licenses to Nvidia and AMD to sell previously banned AI chips to China. Trump was questioned at a press briefing on Monday about the deal, and it appears that future negotiations on more modern, cutting-edge hardware might also be on the table in future.
"The chip that we're talking about, the H20... it's an old chip, China already has it, in a different form, different name" said Trump.
"Jensen also has a new chip, the Blackwell, do you know what the Blackwell is?" he asked the assembled reporters. "The Blackwell is super-duper advanced. I wouldn't make a deal with that.
"Although, it's possible I'd make a deal [with a] somewhat enhanced—in a negative way—Blackwell."
Trump continued: "In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it. But that's the latest and greatest in the world, nobody has it, they won't have it for five years... but the H20 is obsolete, y'know it's one of those things, but it still has the market."
"On the Blackwell, I think he [Jensen Huang] is coming to see me about that. But that will be an unenhanced version of the big one. Like... we will sometimes sell fighter jets to a country, and we'll give them 20% less than we have."
Well, that all makes sense. Sort of. Nvidia has previously released the limited-AI-performance RTX 4090D and RTX 5090D for the China-only market in order to meet existing chip export restrictions, so creating a limited version of a Blackwell AI GPU and shipping it towards those same shores as part of a new deal strikes as much of the same thing.
And given the immense power of a Blackwell chip, I'd imagine Chinese companies would be scrambling to get their hands on them, even if they've had 30 to 50% of their performance curtailed. Each GPU would likely still be quicker than an Nvidia H20, and a new agreement would perhaps cause an end to the alleged Chinese black market for Blackwell chips, of which, the Financial Times recently reported, $1 billion worth are said to have been sold over the past three months.
What would the US be negotiating for in exchange for this hypothetical deal, I wonder? If I were a betting man, I'd say more rare earth metals and magnets, like the current arrangement. Still, there's always room to be surprised. Another Boeing 747 for the fleet? Trump says his new Qatar-provided model is much too big, so you never know.
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