President Donald Trump’s recent decision to allow a U.S. tech company to sell advanced microchips to China has raised concerns among experts, who worry that the tech company may be jeopardizing national security for the sake of profits.

As The Washington Stand reported Wednesday, the president greenlit a plan for Nvidia to sell H200 graphics processing units (GPUs) to “approved customers in China,” with the U.S. taking a 25% cut of international sales. An upgrade over the company’s H100, Nvidia’s H200 “supercharges generative AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads with game-changing performance and memory capabilities,” according to the company.

On Wednesday night’s episode of “Washington Watch,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission member Joshua Hodges, a former advisor to Trump on China policy, shared his concerns over the White House-approved deal. “This does sort of raise the question of ‘What is the United States doing in the long term to halt China’s rapid growth and advancement on technology on the technology front? And then how is China using that technology?’” Hodges asked. He noted that “we don’t just assume” that advanced technology sold to China is used to bolster the Chinese military, “we know it.” He explained, “This not only saves the Chinese money, time, and effort that they otherwise would be having to divert their resources towards, we’re giving them tools now that they can just immediately plug in, that have military applications, and that is going to enable military capabilities to be better connected.”

“So we know that the Chinese are using some of this technology. The immediate applications [are]: they will take this, they will build their own stack. So there is the economic competition part,” Hodges observed. “These are high-end capability chips that have higher memory, and so they’re going to have military applications if they’re plugged into [that] military tech,” he noted. In particular, he warned that the AI capabilities of the Nvidia chips could vastly improve China’s missile systems. “That is something they have said they plan to do, and they’re going to use these chips to do that.”

“There’s the argument made that by allowing these chips to go forward, we’re going to make them dependent on the United States. That’s never been proven. That model has been tried before,” Hodges cautioned. He pointed to the U.S. strategy in the 1990s of affording China most-favored nation (MFN) status, in an effort to impact China’s policy via economic negotiations and a trade partnership. That method “has never been proven right on any technology that we’ve provided to China, and I don’t think it’s going to be the case here either.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins argued that “actually the opposite” is true, “that it’s changed America more than it has changed China, that our dealings with them economically [have] actually seduced more American businesses even to go down this trail of providing technology that is being used against us and our allies.” Hodges agreed, warning that the move further sends a confusing message to U.S. allies, who have been asked not to sell related technology to China. “Those allies are now going to be asking the question, ‘If you can sell the chips directly, why can’t I sell manufacturing equipment to make this type of technology?’”

One argument advanced in favor of selling the H200 chips to China was that the H200 is still inferior to Nvidia’s most advanced GPU, the Blackwell. However, Hodges emphasized that the H200 is still “much better, years more advanced” than the technology China has access to at present. “Some estimates say that the earliest they would have gotten this capability would have been 2027,” he said. “There’s this misnomer that because they’re not the absolute best, you know, it really doesn’t matter. They’re still five times better than the other chips that previously would have been provided to them.”

China also has a lengthy history of stealing American intellectual property (IP), especially in technology and weapons, so that the sale of H200, Hodges argued, will “enable them to be able to replicate it faster, because we know they’ll find a way to steal that IP. They’ll find a way to go back and be able to produce those chips at a much faster rate than they would have had they just been devoting their own resources to it.”

“They are certainly building on the backs of American capabilities and American technology. That is absolutely true,” Hodges reiterated. He posited that “a lot of the destabilization that’s occurred in the last two years” has been backed by China, who exports the IP it has stolen from the U.S. to “repressive regimes, whether it’s in Venezuela, in South America or in helping Russia and the war against Ukraine,” or possibly even aiding Hamas in the October 7, 2023 attack against Israel. “It is now [an] established, well-understood fact that the Chinese have — their tech exports have largely helped a lot of these conflicts,” Hodges observed. “A lot of the fires that President Trump inherited when he came into office, the Chinese are behind the scenes on most of it.”

So why would the president approve the sale of advanced microchips with significant military applications to such a hostile entity? “Frankly, it comes down to the fact that folks believe the president is getting bad information from an American company that is pursuing the bottom line over America’s national security in the long run,” Hodges suggested. That “bad information” is “largely coming from one company related to this issue, and that company is … prioritizing their bottom line for their shareholders over the national security interests.”

Hodges observed that “it’s often hard to get your point across when you’re talking about a technology where this company is supposed to know the ins and outs of all of it.” He continued, “But the reality here is this company views the market in China as a honeypot, a golden pot that they need access to and they want access to. … They want to make as much money for their shareholders as possible.”