President Donald Trump has authorised Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to resume shipments of certain artificial-intelligence chips to China in exchange for paying 15 per cent of related revenue to the U.S. Treasury, according to legal filings and company statements. The unprecedented arrangement reverses an export ban imposed in April and covers Nvidia’s H20 accelerator and AMD’s MI308 processor. Analysts at Bernstein estimate the levy could shave five to 15 percentage points from gross margins on the China-bound products, while bipartisan lawmakers say monetising export licences undermines national-security controls. The policy shift immediately drew push-back on Capitol Hill. Senate Democratic leaders and members of the House Select Committee on China warned that the “pay-for-play” model risks setting a precedent that sensitive technologies can be bought out of restriction. Trade specialists also questioned the legality of what some described as a de-facto export tax, noting the U.S. Constitution bars duties on outbound goods. In Beijing, scrutiny of American hardware is intensifying. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has summoned leading cloud and internet firms including Tencent, ByteDance and Baidu to justify their purchases of Nvidia’s H20 chips and urged them to shift toward domestic alternatives. Separately, a nationwide directive now requires publicly funded AI data-centres to source at least 50 per cent of their processors from Chinese suppliers by 2025, a move that could deepen reliance on Huawei’s Ascend series and other local designs. China remains a major, though diminishing, market for Nvidia. The chipmaker booked US$17.1 billion in Chinese sales in the year to January, about 13 per cent of revenue, and another $5.5 billion, or 12.5 per cent, in the quarter ended 27 April. Whether the new U.S. levy preserves that business or accelerates Beijing’s push for semiconductor self-sufficiency now hangs on how both governments enforce — and potentially renegotiate — their nascent AI-chip détente.