US President Donald Trump has outlined his intention to limit the export of flagship Blackwells: the most advanced processors will remain for American customers, while simplified options may be offered to other countries.
US President Donald Trump has outlined his intention to limit the export of flagship Blackwells: the most advanced processors will remain for American customers, while simplified options may be offered to other countries.
According to Reuters, Donald Trump stressed that the «most advanced» Blackwells would not go to Chinese companies. At the same time, he did not rule out the supply of less productive versions in order to maintain commercial relations without transferring the best technologies. The statement means a possible tightening of existing restrictions on the export of American semiconductors and narrowing access to top chips outside the United States.
The context for the supercomputer and data center market is critical: the Blackwell line is the core of Nvidia’s most powerful solutions for training and running large language models. Last week, the company announced the delivery of more than 260,000 Blackwells to South Korea for large corporations, including Samsung, underscoring the global demand for such processors. At the same time, in July, the Trump administration presented an AI policy «roadmap» that declares the expansion of exports to allies.
In Washington, there is criticism of any concessions to the Chinese: congressmen from the anti-China committee believe that even trimmed chips can accelerate China’s military and AI development. In turn, Nvidia CEO Jensen Guang stated that the company has not applied for new export licenses for China because Beijing’s position on Nvidia currently makes normal sales impossible; at the same time, access to a large market is important for funding R&D in the United States.
The US has been gradually tightening controls on the export of high-performance GPUs to China since 2022, in an effort to maintain its technological edge. Nvidia has responded by creating lower-performance lines to comply with export control requirements, but the data center and cloud markets will become even more fragmented if Blackwell’s «high-end» segment is formally reserved for US customers only.
Previously, dev.ua wrote about how Nvidia crossed the $5 trillion mark for the first time. The company rose thanks to explosive demand for its chips, which are used to train and run artificial intelligence systems.
