“To call this unusual or unprecedented would be a staggering understatement,” said Stephen Olson, a former US trade negotiator now with the Singapore-based ISEA — Yusof Ishak Institute. “What we are seeing is in effect the monetisation of US trade policy in which US companies must pay the US government for permission to export. If that’s the case, we’ve entered into a new and dangerous world.”
The revenue-for-exports deal between the US government and two of the world’s biggest chipmakers opens a new front in a trading regime turned upside down by Donald Trump.
Nvidia Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc agreed to pay the US government 15% of revenue from some chip sales to China. The chips — Nvidia’s H20 AI accelerator and AMD’s MI308 chips — were earlier banned by the Trump administration and require export licenses to sell.
