Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world—and potentially one of the foremost threats to America’s national security. The world’s first corporation to be valued at $4 trillion, it has led the way in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and powered the AI acceleration of the past few years. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest, could not have improved and grown as quickly as they have without the company’s chips.
It is now widely recognized across the political spectrum that semiconductors are critical to great power competition. The side with the best chips will have the edge over its adversaries. While Nvidia helped put America ahead in the AI race, it has also become a formidable obstacle in the way of achieving AI dominance. The Biden administration’s export restrictions on semiconductors in 2022 and 2023 were an attempt to make it as costly and as difficult as possible for Chinese tech companies to get the chips they need to support their own AI models. Since then, Nvidia has sought to get around these restrictions in various ways.
CEO Jensen Huang has claimed there is “no evidence of any AI chip diversion.” But there is plenty of evidence that Nvidia chips have been making their way to China. The company’s revenue in Singapore has increased from $2.3 billion in 2023 to $23.7 billion in 2025, as chips are diverted through the country on their way to China, leading the Singaporean government to launch investigations into the smuggling of chips. The evidence of backdoor sales is there for anyone to see on social media. The surprise launch of DeepSeek R1 earlier this year could not have happened without these chips, even if they were not the most advanced models. Nvidia has also tried to bypass export restrictions by selling less sophisticated chips to China. This is helping Chinese companies like DeepSeek stay in the AI race.
None of this is to say that export restrictions can’t work. Although DeepSeek proved Chinese AI companies can find ways to use limited resources efficiently, their progress has slowed. Limited access to advanced chips has caused DeepSeek to delay the launch of their next model.
While it is to be expected that a company will seek to work around regulations to maximize profits and protect its interests, Nvidia’s political links with Beijing are concerning. In an interview with Chinese media, Huang praised China’s innovation record, giving the regime a propaganda boost. Sam Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, has seen this as proof of Nvidia’s absence of “corporate patriotic responsibility.” Huang is either being naïve or disingenuous when he frames Nvidia chips as a purely commercial product. AI is an inherently dual-use technology, and the Chinese military actively wants Nvidia chips.
Meanwhile, the company is applying political pressure to protect itself. The Trump administration was ready to pull the trigger on banning the export of Nvidia H20 chips to China in April, but then caved after intense lobbying and a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. This has been followed by a deal allowing Nvidia and AMD to export more advanced chips in return for 15 percent of the sales revenue going to the federal government. This is a misjudged concession.
“Appeasing both Washington and Beijing is not a viable strategy.”
Some have argued that Nvidia should be allowed to export chips and keep China dependent on American tech. But following Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s remark that “you want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” Beijing is making moves to restrict the import of H20 chips into China. The Chinese government is eager to wean their tech giants off Nvidia and move towards home-designed chips from Huawei that will not be vulnerable to US interference.
In the long run, appeasing both Washington and Beijing is not a viable strategy. Huang needs to pick a side.
Nvidia’s stance reflects a broader cultural problem within the tech industry. From its beginnings, Silicon Valley has been characterized by a hyper-individualist worldview with its roots in the 1960s counterculture. The industry’s typically Californian emphasis on personal autonomy and nonconformity, combined with the globalization of the economy, gave rise to leaders who were unlikely to view the interests of their companies as closely linked to those of the nation.
Despite its countercultural leanings, Silicon Valley owes its institutional existence to the federal contracts and subsidies—mostly related to the military—that funded research, built roads, grew cities, and provided education and training. But big tech largely purged this element of its founding story from its collective memory. That said, a shift seems to be underway. For instance, in his new book The Technological Republic, Palantir CEO and co-founder Alex Karp embraces Silicon Valley’s military heritage and argues that the tech sector needs to recover its sense of public duty, civilizational identity, and patriotic responsibility. In response to heightened geopolitical tensions, other entrepreneurs have been shifting their innovative efforts into defense tech.
Despite his company’s significance for national security, Huang remains wedded to the individualist and globalist outlook. He talks enthusiastically about people owning their own personal robot companions and driverless cars, but does not seem concerned about where these products will be coming from. If China is the country designing, manufacturing, and selling the AI and robotics products of the future then it will control our destiny.
Of course, the federal government has long struggled to balance its commitment to technological dominance with holding corporate power to account. President Theodore Roosevelt was among the first to grapple with this challenge. At the turn of the century, poor working conditions, unsanitary food processing, environmental degradation, and political corruption all demanded government action. But Roosevelt saw no contradiction in allowing massive corporations to exist provided they served the public interest.
“The United States needs … to steer corporate power toward the pursuit of shared national interests.”
That is why Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to call on corporations to change their behavior. In his first State of the Union address in 1901, he declared: “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.” This provided the basis for his great antitrust battle with Northern Securities and signaled a shift in culture that was ably followed by his successor, William Howard Taft. These efforts laid the groundwork for the more mid-century partnership that arose and helped cement the American Century.
The United States needs to reinitiate this process, seeking to steer corporate power toward the pursuit of shared national interests. Large corporations will always be necessary for economies of scale, but they should not have complete power either. This doesn’t mean suffocating the tech sector with regulation, as some Democratic-led states risk doing. But antitrust can be used intelligently to give “Little Tech” startups an opportunity to enter the market. And Nvidia ought to remain under investigation by the Department of Justice and be held accountable.
Today, the priority must be the enhancement and enforcement of semiconductor supply chain security. To start with, Trump should reverse course and ban the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China. Beijing is currently restricting the export of rare earth elements, and Washington would be wise to respond in kind. The White House’s AI Action Plan clearly states, “the United States must also prevent our adversaries from using our innovations to their own ends in ways that undermine our national security.” We need to cut off China’s supply of advanced chips.
More can also be done to continue the reshoring and friendshoring of semiconductor supply chains and insulate the American economy from any potential global disruptions, such as a blockade of Taiwan. This should mean extending export controls to cloud services remotely accessed by China in countries like Singapore and overhauling the Bureau of Industry and Security’s enforcement arm. There is legislation in Congress that should be backed by the Trump administration, such as the Stop Stealing Our Chips Act, establishing a whistleblower incentive program for chip smuggling, the Chip Security Act, requiring export-controlled chips to have a location verification mechanism, and the GAIN AI Act to force chipmakers to prioritize domestic customers ahead of foreign orders.
If Nvidia continues to sell advanced chips to China, put pressure on officials, and evade export restrictions, then the Trump administration should take full legal and political action, just as Roosevelt did with the robber barons. Doing so would powerfully assert the primacy of the national interest over corporate interests. If the federal government retreats and does not confront Nvidia, it puts America’s AI ambitions at risk, weakens the position of the US tech sector, and could give China the vital breathing space it needs to race ahead of the United States.