U.S. choke on AI chip exports
U.S. bureaucracy is delaying shipments of AI accelerators to China even where sales were allowed in principle. The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security has suffered roughly 20% staff turnover, creating approval backlogs that have kept Nvidia from shipping H200 chips and AMD from delivering MI308 accelerators. Industry estimates say Nvidia had expected to sell about 1.5 million H200 chips in China in 2025 — a volume that implies tens of billions of dollars in revenue now at risk. (startupnews.fyi) (xataka.com) (ecosistemastartup.com)
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have U.S. permission in principle to sell some artificial intelligence chips to China, but the licenses are stuck inside the Commerce Department. (bloomberg.com) The holdup sits at the Bureau of Industry and Security, the Commerce office that reviews exports of sensitive technology. Bloomberg reported that the bureau has lost 101 employees since 2024, a 19% drop, and that turnover among rulemaking and licensing staff has approached 20%. (finance.yahoo.com) That staffing loss has stretched reviews into months. Bloomberg said average license turnaround rose to 76 days in the first half of 2025, up from 38 days in 2023, while processed licenses fell about 25%. (newsdefused.com) The delayed products are not consumer gadgets. Nvidia’s H200 and Advanced Micro Devices’ MI308 are data-center accelerators, the chips that train and run large artificial intelligence models inside server racks. (sec.gov) Those sales matter because China has been a large Nvidia market even under tightening controls. Nvidia’s latest annual report put China at about 13% of fiscal 2025 revenue, or roughly $17 billion. (qatar-tribune.com) Advanced Micro Devices has already warned investors what export controls can cost. In an April 15, 2025 filing, the company said the new U.S. license requirement applied to MI308 products and that it expected to seek licenses with no assurance they would be granted; the company later said the rule could lead to an $800 million charge. (sec.gov) (cnbc.com) The bottleneck also cuts against Washington’s own recent policy shift. Bloomberg reported that licenses tied to Nvidia shipments to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a 25% import-duty framework for H200 sales to approved Chinese customers, and Advanced Micro Devices’ MI308 approvals all run through the same office. (finance.yahoo.com) The bureau’s workload has grown well beyond chips. A Government Accountability Office report published in 2025 said the agency’s funding and headcount had expanded sharply since 2013, while Bloomberg reported that the same office is also handling tariff probes and other trade reviews for the Trump administration. (files.gao.gov) (ttnews.com) The Commerce Department says the Bureau of Industry and Security exists to protect national security while promoting U.S. technology leadership. Right now, the immediate result is that chips Washington decided could be sold are still not moving. (bis.gov)
