In the race for AI dominance with China, the United States’s one undeniable advantage is our access to the world’s most advanced AI hardware. We are home to the world leader in AI chip design, Nvidia, over half of hyperscale cloud capacity, and nearly 75 percent of the world’s AI supercomputing resources.
This lead, however, is tenuous at best. With a global build-out of new infrastructure underway, most of the aggregate computing capacity needed to power the AI revolution into the 2030s and beyond has yet to be built. China might soon race ahead of America.
In this light, approving the export of Nvidia’s H20 chip to China, as the Trump administration did in August, could not be more misguided. The H20 is a cut-down chip that Nvidia created specifically for China following the export controls introduced by the Commerce Department in October 2023. With fast memory and Nvidia’s polished software systems, the H20 is formidable for deploying AI models to users.
