A GROUP of 20 US national security experts is urging the Biden administration to block Nvidia from selling its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China, warning that such a move could jeopardize America’s technological and military edge in a report filed on July 29, 2025 by Mike Robuck, US editor at Mobile World Live.
In a letter sent on July 28 to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the group argued that allowing Nvidia to resume exports of its reconfigured H20 GPU represents “a strategic misstep that endangers the United States’ economic and military edge” in AI technology.
The H20 chip was redesigned after the Biden administration imposed export controls in October 2023 to curb China’s access to advanced AI hardware. The letter’s authors emphasized that the H20, tailored to comply with those restrictions, remains highly powerful — especially in AI inference tasks crucial for cutting-edge machine learning applications.
“The H20 is a potent accelerator of China’s frontier AI capabilities, not an outdated AI chip,” the letter stated. “Designed specifically to work around export control thresholds, the H20 is optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models.”
The group noted that the H20 outperforms Nvidia’s restricted H100 chip in certain inference tasks and warned that resuming its sale to China would divert critical hardware from US developers and potentially assist China’s military development.
“The decision to ban H20 exports earlier this year was the right one,” the letter continued. “We ask you to stand by that principle and continue blocking the sale of advanced AI chips to China. This is not a question of trade. It is a question of national security.”
Signatories include former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, former Department of Homeland Security official Stewart Baker, and David Feith, a former member of the National Security Council.
Earlier this month, Nvidia reportedly received assurances from US authorities that it could resume sales of the H20 in China, a decision expected to significantly benefit the chipmaker financially.
The letter follows the Trump administration’s recent unveiling of its AI action plan aimed at maintaining US global leadership in artificial intelligence. In a separate letter, the chair of the House panel on China also voiced opposition to Nvidia’s renewed sales plans.
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