Trump's Disappearing Messages

It sometimes feels there’s an element of the supernatural in the Trump administration’s dealings with the business world. Stuff gets announced and then disappears into the ether, never to be heard of again. Take President Donald Trump’s announcement in August that he’d let Nvidia sell its H20 AI chips to China, in exchange for a 15% cut of the resulting revenue. All we’ve heard of that deal since then is Nvidia’s repeated statements in securities filings that the government “has not published a regulation codifying such [a] requirement,” and so it hasn’t sold any of the chips.

You have to wonder whether the same thing will happen with the latest Nvidia-China approval Trump granted, for the sale of H200 chips, which involves a 25% cut for the U.S. government. Of course, that announcement might be moot for a different reason: The Chinese government might block local companies from buying the chips. While we reported last week that Chinese authorities were OK with local companies buying Nvidia chips for training AI models—which applies to the H200s—things may not be that straightforward, as the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. One skeptic is tech analyst Patrick Moorhead, who said on The Information’s TITV on Tuesday that “until they start shipping and revenue gets cited by Nvidia, I’m not yet a believer that this is a done deal.” The uncertainty may be why Nvidia’s stock slipped a bit on Tuesday.