20 National Security Experts Urge Trump Administration to Restrict Nvidia H20 Sales to China

There is widespread discontent regarding the Trump administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 advanced AI chips in China once again.

A coalition of 20 national security experts and former officials sent a letter to U.S. Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday, urging the Trump administration to rethink its recent approval of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip sales in China.

The letter condemned this decision as a “strategic miscalculation” that could undermine the U.S.’s advantage in AI for both military and civilian applications.

Particularly, the letter emphasized the H20’s AI inference capabilities, which utilize a trained AI model to derive decisions from new data.

“The H20 acts as a significant accelerator for China’s advanced AI capabilities, rather than being an outdated AI chip,” the letter claimed. “Designed to bypass export control limitations, the H20 is specifically optimized for inference—the process responsible for the substantial performance gains of the latest advanced AI reasoning models. For inference tasks, the H20 surpasses the H100, another AI chip that this administration has restricted due to its superior functionality.”

Moreover, the letter argued that permitting H20 chip sales in China would worsen the existing AI chip scarcity in the U.S.; these chips could support China’s military advancements; and this choice would erode overall chip export limits.

“The previous decision to ban H20 exports was the right one,” the letter strongly stated. “We urge you to maintain that stance and continue to stop the sale of advanced AI chips to China as America seeks to preserve its technological superiority. This matter goes beyond trade; it is fundamentally a question of national security.

Signatories of the letter include Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser during Trump’s first term; Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security under George W. Bush; and David Feith, a former member of the National Security Council, among others.

This letter comes in response to the recent decision by the DOC to permit Nvidia to restart its sales of AI chips in China, associated with ongoing trade negotiations regarding rare earth minerals. At the time, Lutnick downplayed the decision’s importance, stating that Nvidia’s H20 was simply the company’s “fourth best” AI chip.

Last week, the Trump administration presented its AI Action Plan, emphasizing the need for U.S. AI chip export restrictions while offering limited information on what those controls would entail.