Nvidia’s most powerful chips will stay in the United States, Trump says
The best chips created by NVIDIA will be reserved just for the United States and kept out of other countries, United States President Donald Trump said.
Trump told American broadcaster CBS on Sunday that only US customers will have access to Nvidia’s most powerful chip line, which refers to the Blackwell chips.
“We will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” Trump said in the interview.
California-based gaming company-turned semiconductor giant Nvidia supplies many of the world’s AI companies with the chips needed to train their large language models (LLMs) on data, including China.
Last week, it became the world’s most valuable company, worth $5 trillion (€4.30 trillion), after breaking the $4 trillion mark earlier this year.
Trump said that other nations that could have access to Nvidia’s full technology stack would have an “equal advantage” of winning the AI race.
NVIDIA will still be able to sell to China in particular, he added, but the country will not be able to buy the company’s most advanced chip.
The news of NVIDIA chip restrictions comes after Trump said he would discuss the Blackwell chips with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting in South Korea but he told American media CNBC that the discussion did not happen as planned.
Trump’s stance on export controls for semiconductors has changed many times during his tenure in the White House, restricting and then approving sales of NVIDIA’s H20 chip to China.
A new AI strategy launchedby Trump’s administration in July showed that Trump wanted to meet global demand for AI by “exporting its full AI technology stack, hardware, models, software, applications and standards” to everyone in “America’s AI alliance.”
Not being able to meet the demand would be “an unforced error,” which would force countries to “turn to [America’s] rivals,” the policy said.
Which companies in Europe are using Nvidia’s chips?
The Export Control Reform Act was passed during Trump’s first term as president. The legislation lets the President control exports for national security and foreign policy purposes.
Euronews Next reached out to the US administration to clarify the president's comments, including whether there would be additional export controls to Europe but did not receive an immediate reply.
In June, Nvidia said it would deploy more than 3,000 exaflops or exascale computing power from Blackwell chip systems to France, Italy and the United Kingdom.
The chips were supposed to go to France’s Mistral AI,, Italian software company Domyn, Dutch cloud company Nebius and AI hyperscaler start-up Nscale to “build infrastructure that will strengthen digital sovereignty … and position the continent as a leader in the AI industrial revolution,” the company said in a press release.
Telecommunications companies Fastweb, Orange, Swisscom, Telefonica and Telenor are also supposed to use Nvidia chips to build agentic AI, a type of AI that can accomplish goals automatically or with little supervision.
Euronews Next also reached out to NVIDIA and the companies above to see if the news from Trump's administration will change these projects.