The US government wants veto power over every advanced AI chip Nvidia and AMD sell anywhere on Earth.
The Signal
The Trump administration is drafting rules that would require export permits for high-end AI chips sold to any country, not just adversaries. This isn't about China anymore. This is about making Nvidia ask Washington for permission before selling H100s to a data center in London or Frankfurt.
The framework they're considering would create a licensing regime for AI chips above certain compute thresholds, likely around 300 TOPS for inference or 600 teraflops for training. Every sale becomes a potential political decision. Nvidia's $90 billion in quarterly revenue suddenly has a government-shaped bottleneck.
Why now? Three reasons. First, the administration sees AI compute as the new oil, strategic infrastructure worth controlling. Second, they're worried about diffusion. Advanced chips sold to allies today end up in Chinese labs tomorrow through shell companies and gray markets. Third, this gives the US massive leverage in AI development globally. Want to build the next frontier model? You'll need American hardware, and American approval.
The draft rules would also create a registry of AI chip deployments, requiring buyers to report what they're building and where. That's surveillance infrastructure dressed up as export control. Every major AI lab outside the US would have to show their cards.
The Implication
If this passes, every AI company with global ambitions needs a Washington strategy yesterday. The compute layer just became geopolitical. For builders, this means the agent economy's infrastructure gets fractured along national lines. For Nvidia and AMD, this means their sales teams need to hire former State Department staff. Watch for companies to start designing around the threshold limits, and for alternative chip architectures to suddenly get very interesting to anyone outside US influence.
Source: Bloomberg Tech