Catenaa, Monday, August 11, 2025– Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay 15% of their revenues from Chinese AI chip sales to the US government in a deal to secure export licenses, Financial Times reported on Monday.
Quoting sources, the report said that Nvidia plans to share 15% of the revenue from sales of its H20 AI accelerator in China, and AMD will deliver the same share from MI308 revenues.
The arrangement reflects US President Donald Trump’s consistent effort to engineer a financial payout for America in return for concessions on trade.
His administration has shown a willingness to relax trade conditions like tariffs in return for giant investments in the US, as with Apple’s pledge to spend $600 billion on domestic manufacturing. But such a narrow, select export tax has little precedent in modern corporate history.
Beijing, which has grown increasingly hostile to the idea of Chinese firms deploying the H20, is unlikely to warm to the idea of a chip tax.
Nvidia shares fell over 0.5% on Monday morning, while AMD shares declined about 1.7%.
An Nvidia spokesperson said the company follows US export rules, adding that while it hasn’t shipped H20 chips to China for months, it hopes the rules will allow US companies to compete in China.
Trump has targeted chipmakers in the past week with a series of declarations that were light on specifics and rattled companies from Silicon Valley to Asia.
Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has lobbied long and hard for the lifting of restrictions, arguing that walling China off will only slow the spread of American technology and encourage local rivals such as Huawei Technologies Co.
Nvidia raked in $4.6 billion of revenue from the H20 in the fiscal quarter ended April 27, days after new restrictions on shipping the AI accelerator to China were imposed.
It also said it had been unable to ship $2.5 billion of H20 China revenue in that period because of the new rules. That implies it would have got more than $7 billion in H20 sales to China during the period. If it can return to that level, the US government will stand to get about a billion dollars a quarter from its deal.
AMD could generate $3 billion to $5 billion of 2025 revenue if restrictions were lifted, Morgan Stanley estimates. Chinese alternatives such as Huawei’s Ascend chips now account for 20% to 30% of domestic demand, it reckoned.
