Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world—and potentially one of the foremost threats to America’s national security. The world’s first corporation to be valued at $4 trillion, it has led the way in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and powered the AI acceleration of the past few years. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest, could not have improved and grown as quickly as they have without the company’s chips.
It is now widely recognized across the political spectrum that semiconductors are critical to great power competition. The side with the best chips will have the edge over its adversaries. While Nvidia helped put America ahead in the AI race, it has also become a formidable obstacle in the way of achieving AI dominance. The Biden administration’s export restrictions on semiconductors in 2022 and 2023 were an attempt to make it as costly and as difficult as possible for Chinese tech companies to get the chips they need to support their own AI models. Since then, Nvidia has sought to get around these restrictions in various ways.
CEO Jensen Huang has claimed there is “no evidence of any AI chip diversion.” But there is plenty of evidence that Nvidia chips have been making their way to China. The company’s revenue in Singapore has increased from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $23.7 billion in 2025, as chips are diverted through the country on their way to China, leading the Singaporean government to launch investigations into the smuggling of chips. The evidence of backdoor sales is there for anyone to see on social media. The surprise launch of DeepSeek R1 earlier this year could not have happened without these chips, even if they were not the most advanced models. Nvidia has also tried to bypass export restrictions by selling less sophisticated chips to China. This is helping Chinese companies like DeepSeek stay in the AI race.
