Export approvals stall for AI chips
Approvals for Nvidia and AMD AI‑chip exports to China are stalling after the Bureau of Industry and Security lost nearly 20% of its licensing staff. Tom's Hardware reports the staffing shortfall has left approvals slow and notes Nvidia has not sold any H200 units to China even months after White House clearance (tomshardware.com).
The office that approves sensitive United States chip exports has become a bottleneck, slowing Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices shipments to China for months. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported on April 10 that the Bureau of Industry and Security lost dozens of experienced employees over the past year, amounting to nearly 20% turnover in its rulemaking and licensing staff. The same report said tighter review by senior officials has stretched approvals for chipmakers and other exporters into “several months.” (bloomberg.com) The delays hit licenses for artificial-intelligence accelerators, the processors that train and run large AI models in data centers. On January 13, the Commerce Department said it would review export applications for Nvidia’s H200, Advanced Micro Devices’ MI325X, and similar chips on a case-by-case basis instead of treating them as presumptively blocked. (bis.gov) That January rule took effect on January 15 and applied to exports to China and Macau if companies met specific conditions. The Federal Register said applicants must certify adequate United States supply, show the sale would not divert foundry capacity from American customers, document the buyer’s security procedures, and submit the chips to independent testing in the United States. (federalregister.gov) Nvidia’s public comments show how little business had cleared the system even after the policy changed. On February 25, Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said “small amounts” of H200 products for China customers had been approved by the United States government, but Nvidia had generated no revenue from them. (cnbc.com) Three weeks later, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said the company had finally received purchase orders and was restarting manufacturing for China-bound H200 chips. Huang told CNBC on March 17 that Nvidia then had clearance “from both sides,” meaning Washington and Beijing. (cnbc.com) China had already started to reopen its side of the process in January. Reuters reported on January 28 that ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent received approval to buy more than 400,000 H200 chips in total, and later reported that DeepSeek also received conditional approval. (usnews.com) The staffing squeeze lands in the middle of a broader policy reversal in Washington. Bloomberg reported that President Donald Trump’s administration wants to expand overseas sales of American AI chips, but the same Bureau of Industry and Security is also handling tariff investigations and other export-control work with a smaller bench. (bloomberg.com) For Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, the immediate problem is not a formal ban but a licensing queue that still decides when approved sales can turn into shipments and revenue. The next test is whether the Bureau of Industry and Security can clear that backlog before companies and customers move on to other chips. (bloomberg.com)
