Howard Lutnick Says Nvidia Is Selling Its ‘Fourth Best’ Chips to China

The Trump White House says it’s content to allow Nvidia to tap into the lucrative Chinese market.

“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CNBC Tuesday afternoon. “I think fourth best is where we have come out that we’re cool.”

Nvidia announced on Monday that the Trump administration has signaled it will allow the company to sell its China-specific H20 chip once more. The news sent shares of the world’s most valuable company, which eclipsed $4 trillion in market cap last week, even higher.

Nvidia’s H20 was designed to be technologically inferior. As Lutnick said, the company also sells three other chips that far surpass the H20’s power. Nvidia is already preparing its transition from Blackwell (its most powerful chip) to Blackwell Ultra and has plans for its next superchip, “Vera Rubin.”

CEO Jensen Huang has pushed to sell the company’s prized chips to China. Before the news, Nvidia said it had lost $8 billion on unshipped orders. The announcement came after Huang met with President Donald Trump at the White House last week.

Lutnick said that the administration shares Huang’s view that cutting China off completely from the chips needed to power artificial intelligence advancements won’t starve China’s AI industry.

“So the idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own, right? So you want to keep one step ahead of what they can build so they keep buying our chips, because, remember, developers are the key to technology,” Lutnick said.

In the end, Lutnick said, it’s better if China becomes reliant on the US for chips.

“So you want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” he said. And that’s the thinking. Donald Trump is on it.”