Why Trump is letting Nvidia sell powerful AI chips to China

Here & Now Anytime

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2025

⏱️ 19 minutes

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Summary

President Trump will allow technology giant Nvidia to sell its second-best artificial intelligence chips to China. The move reverses years of policy restrictions and could help push China farther along in the AI race. "Chip War" author Chris Miller shares more.

Then, Paramount launched a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery after Warner Bros. agreed last week to sell its streaming and studio businesses to Netflix. David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, bought Paramount this summer. The Ellisons have strong ties to Trump. And a firm run by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner would help finance Paramount's bid. NPR’s David Folkenflik explains what this could mean for U.S. consumers.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like,
0:09.3	why is innovation and health care so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:20.4	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:25.9	There's been really no doubt that access to computing power is one of the fundamental drivers of AI progress.
0:32.3	So we should think very carefully about who gets to access these advanced ships.
0:36.4	How to stay ahead in the AI race while still making a boatload of money.
0:51.1	It's Tuesday, December 9th, and this is here and now anytime from NPR and WBWR, Boston.
0:56.8	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:00.4	Today on the show, big business and big government in America.
1:05.5	It's long been a complicated relationship, but as with many things, President Trump has put his own spin on the issue.
1:13.0	We'll dig into the mega merger frenzy in media with Paramounts, Warner Brothers, and Netflix,
1:19.6	which the president was asked about earlier this week.
1:21.9	Should they be allowed to buy Warner Brothers?
1:24.6	Well, that's the question. They have a very big market share. And when they have Warner Brothers, you know, that chair goes up a lot. So I don't know. That's going to be for some economists to tell. And also, and I'll be involved in that decision too. But first, there's another decision that Trump's definitely involved in, one that's shaping the race to develop artificial intelligence.
1:45.8	The president now says he's going to let Nvidia sell more advanced chips to China.
1:51.2	The chips in question, Nvidia's H-200 line, are the company's second best.
1:56.8	But second best is still a big deal for Chinese companies like Alibaba, Bite Dance, and Tencent,
2:02.6	because they had been banned from buying even those and forced to rely on inferior chips produced domestically.
2:10.2	Some Chinese companies are even training their AI models overseas to get around the ban.
2:15.8	Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, has been lobbying the government to loosen its restrictions
2:21.0	for years.
2:22.2	So this is a major shift in U.S. tech policy.
	...

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