The Right Way to Sell Chips to China
Current export rules focus on keeping chips a generation behind. They should focus on keeping America's total compute ahead.
Alasdair Phillips-Robins and Noah Tan
This article was originally published in AI Frontiers on April 13, 2026. Read the full article HERE.
Last December, President Trump announced that the United States would allow Nvidia to sell its powerful H200 AI processors to customers in China. Officials in the Trump administration have long argued that the best way to win the AI race is to promote the export of US technology around the world, not to restrict it. Selling H200s, the administration claims, will boost the market share of US chip-makers while preserving the US hardware lead.
Whereas Biden-era export controls attempted to make the US compute advantage as large as possible, an export-friendly framework could instead focus on maintaining a fixed, favorable compute advantage. To do so, policymakers should peg the quality of exported chips to the performance of China’s domestically manufactured alternatives, while capping quantities of those US chip exports.
This article was originally published in AI Frontiers on April 13, 2026. Read the full article HERE.
Alasdair Phillips-Robins is a fellow in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where his research focuses on emerging technology and national security. From 2023 to 2025, he served as a senior policy advisor to U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, where he covered AI, semiconductors, export controls, and other emerging technology and international issues.
Noah Tan is the James C. Gaither Junior Fellow for the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His work centers on AI supply chains and international technology competition. Previously, he was a research affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Hoover Institution, where he worked on international security and economic statecraft. He holds a B.A. In International Relations with Honors and Distinction from Stanford University and is a 2027 Schwarzman Scholar.