On Wednesday, May 21, a senior official from the White House stated that the Trump administration will continue its efforts to prevent advanced artificial intelligence technology from falling into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. This official’s remarks were made in response to the appeal from Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, to relax restrictions on chip exports to China.
White House Senior Artificial Intelligence Policy Advisor, Sriram Krishnan, expressed in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Wednesday, “We obviously have a lot of respect for Jensen Huang.”
“As for China, I do think that there is still a general concern in both parties about what happens once these GPUs enter China,” he added.
While the Trump administration believes that easing restrictions on artificial intelligence chip exports to the CCP poses security risks, Krishnan also mentioned that he agrees with Huang’s perspective, which calls for a reevaluation of restrictions imposed on numerous other US trading partners.
The Trump administration is in the process of repealing the artificial intelligence proliferation rules established during the Biden era and aims to replace them with new regulations. On May 13, the US Department of Commerce announced the formal revocation of the “AI Diffusion Rule” put in place by the previous Biden administration and concurrently introduced multiple measures to strengthen export controls on global semiconductors, especially AI chips.
“In terms of other regions around the world, we hope that the US artificial intelligence technology stack remains consistent from GPUs to models, and all top-level aspects align with the US,” Krishnan stated. “On this point, Jensen Huang and I are in agreement.”
Just hours before Krishnan made these statements, at the Computex industry conference held in Taipei, Jensen Huang urged the US to lower barriers to chip sales to China to prevent American companies from conceding market share to competitors like Huawei. He believed that US export controls have been unsuccessful.
H20 is an artificial intelligence accelerator card introduced by Nvidia for the Chinese market at the end of 2023. It was the most advanced artificial intelligence chip legally available for purchase by Chinese buyers to use in large model training and inference. However, starting from April 2025, this special chip for China was included in the US government’s export control list and now requires a license for export.
During a financial earnings call in February this year, Huang disclosed that the company’s revenue from China had dropped by half compared to before the export control measures were put in place. He cautioned that competition in China is intensifying and for the second consecutive year, listed Huawei as a competitor in the company’s annual report.
Krishnan highlighted that last week during President Trump’s visit to the Middle East, US companies announced a series of projects in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, demonstrating efforts to simplify allies’ access to AI. He emphasized that these agreements will still include security restrictions to prevent the illegal transfer of advanced technology to China and other adversaries.
“These deals and GPUs will mainly be operated by US hyperscale computing companies, US cloud service providers, and US companies,” Krishnan stated. Prior to joining the White House, he was a general partner at venture capital firm Anderson Horowitz.
“Most GPUs will be operated, hosted, and controlled by US companies,” he added.
Regarding AI chip transactions between the US and Gulf countries, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer expressed concerns, stating, “Such transactions could be very dangerous, as we are uncertain how Saudi Arabia and the UAE will prevent the CCP from acquiring these chips.”