The next front in Donald Trump's trade war will be chip tariffs—which could come by next month—but national security experts are warning that the president may have already made a huge misstep that threatens to disrupt both US trade and national security.
In a letter Monday to Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, 20 policymakers and professionals with a background in national security policy urged Trump to reverse course and block exports of Nvidia's H20 chips to China.
In April, the Trump administration decided against imposing additional export curbs on H20 chips after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang paid $1 million for a seat at a Mar-a-Lago dinner, NPR reported. Apparently, Nvidia's promise to invest $500 billion in AI data centers helped persuade Trump to change course, as did the terms of a temporary truce with China, in which the US promised to halt H20 chip controls in exchange for China restoring imports of rare earth minerals into the US.
