Chip exports stall at the approvals desk
Approvals for Nvidia and AMD AI‑chip exports to China are stalling because the U.S. Commerce Department office handling reviews has faced about 20% staff turnover, creating a bureaucratic bottleneck. The staffing squeeze has left companies unable to complete deliveries — Nvidia has formal permission to sell H200 GPUs to China but still cannot ship until explicit approvals clear the backlog. (startupnews.fyi, xataka.com)
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices can legally pursue some China sales again, but a staffing crunch inside the U.S. export-control office is slowing the approvals needed to actually ship. (finance.yahoo.com) The office is the Bureau of Industry and Security, a Commerce Department unit that reviews exports of sensitive technology. Bloomberg’s reporting, cited by Yahoo Finance, said the bureau has lost 101 employees since 2024, a 19% drop, and turnover among rulemaking and licensing staff is near 20%. (finance.yahoo.com) That slowdown is landing on Nvidia’s H200 and Advanced Micro Devices’ MI325X chips, which the bureau moved on January 15, 2026 from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review for China and Macau. The Federal Register rule says exporters still must show U.S. supply is sufficient, buyers have security procedures, and the chips pass third-party testing in the United States. (federalregister.gov) In plain terms, the rule changed the answer from “almost certainly no” to “maybe, if every condition is documented.” That means a policy opening on paper still depends on individual licenses moving through a small office in Washington. (federalregister.gov) Nvidia has been describing that gap for weeks. On March 17, 2026, Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the company had received purchase orders from China and was restarting manufacturing, after Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said on February 25 that only a “small number” of H200 products had been approved and the company had generated no revenue from them. (cnbc.com, s201.q4cdn.com) The approvals desk is also carrying more work than chip licenses alone. The Bureau of Industry and Security said on April 7, 2026 that it extended a separate timeline for “Approved IC Designer” applications through December 31, 2026 so companies would have more time to apply and the agency would have more time to process them. (bis.gov) This is not the first warning about the backlog. Reuters reported on August 1, 2025 that thousands of U.S. export-license applications were stuck in limbo, including Nvidia shipments to China, as internal disruption and staff losses at Commerce slowed reviews. (usnews.com) The bottleneck sits in the middle of a larger U.S.-China chip fight that has already forced Nvidia to redesign products for China more than once. China had once contributed at least one-fifth of Nvidia’s data-center revenue, CNBC reported, which helps explain why even limited H200 access is being watched so closely. (cnbc.com) Commerce has not publicly announced a broad new fix for the licensing queue, and the January rule still leaves each shipment subject to review. Until those case files clear, the policy change that reopened the door to some China sales remains stuck at the desk. (federalregister.gov, bis.gov)
