Nvidia, AMD reportedly granted export licenses for chip sales to China in exchange for giving US government 15% of revenues
The Financial Times is reporting that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have formally secured permission to export AI chips tailored for China to the world’s second-largest economy. As part of the deal, the companies have agreed to send 15% of the revenues generated from these chip sales to the US government, per the FT, citing people familiar with the situation including a US official.
That part of this arrangement is highly unusual, and has been met with critiques from trade policy experts.
The Chinese would pay a lot for F35s and advanced US military technology, too. Regardless of whether you think Nvidia should be able to sell H20s in China, charging a fee in exchange for relaxing national security export controls is a terrible precedent. https://t.co/hsMQzwDyHb
— Peter Harrell (@petereharrell) August 10, 2025
After the close on Friday, the FT reported that Nvidia had received an export license that would allow the chip designer to send its H20 processor to China once again.
In mid-July, both companies received assurances that they’d be granted export licenses to restore their access to what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls a $50 billion data center market, sparking big rallies in their stocks.
In its second-quarter earnings report last week, AMD posted better-than-expected guidance for the current quarter, but noted that its license application was still under review and that this outlook did not include any revenues from MI308 sales to China.
Per Reuters, Chinese demand for Nvidia’s H20 chips is also so intense that the chip designer has already ordered an additional 300,000 chips from TSMC.
In their Q1 earnings reports, Nvidia and AMD took $4.5 billion and $800 million write-downs, respectively, related to the loss of their China business in light of export controls put in place in April.
Nvidia’s calendar 2025 sales estimates are up just 0.7% in the past month, suggesting that analysts have been slow to incorporate the impact of renewed access to the Chinese market into their forecasts. For AMD, however, estimates are up 3.6% over the same period, which may have been indicative of Wall Street expecting some boost from sales to China or may have also reflected optimism around its new line of AI chips.
