U.S. Government to Take Cut of Nvidia and AMD AI Chip Sales to China

SAN FRANCISCO — Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15% of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a highly unusual financial agreement with the Trump administration.

The deal, which was described by three people familiar with the agreement who spoke anonymously because they didn’t have permission to discuss it publicly, comes a month after Nvidia received permission to sell a version of its artificial intelligence chips to China.

While the Trump administration publicly said a month ago that it was giving the green light to Nvidia to sell an AI chip called H20 to China, it did not actually issue the licenses making those sales possible.

On Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15% cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for AI chip sales two days later, these people said.

Though Huang has led negotiations with the White House, Nvidia isn’t the only company that sells AI chips to China. AMD has an AI chip called the MI308 and in April the Trump administration also banned sales of it to the Chinese.

There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving U.S. companies. In June, the administration approved investment by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, in U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the company, a rarely used practice where the government takes a stake in a business.