Nvidia Comes Out Swinging as Congress Weighs Limits on China Chip Sales

Rankling national security experts, the chipmaker has stepped up attacks on lawmakers who are pushing restrictions.

With the Trump administration loosening restrictions on selling artificial intelligence chips to China, congressional leaders are stepping in with their own limits. The Senate and House are weighing new rules that would require the critical technology to be offered to American companies before it could be sold to Chinese businesses.

The chip giant Nvidia, which could make as much as $50 billion in A.I. chip sales to China over the next year, has responded with an unconventional lobbying blitz that tars the Republican-proposed rules as a product of left-wing paranoia peddled by people it calls A.I. doomers.

The company’s furious effort has muddied the A.I. policy debate while shocking Republicans who support the new measures. And it has dragged perplexed Washington insiders into a parochial Silicon Valley dispute between people known as accelerationists, who want to speed A.I.’s development to unlock trillions of dollars in economic value, and doomers, who worry that the technology could destroy humanity.

The Senate is expected to vote on its version of the rules as early as Tuesday, when it takes up a package of amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. Senator Jim Banks, the Indiana Republican who introduced the policy, has defended it as an “America First amendment.”

“I don’t know how anybody could be against this,” Mr. Banks said last week on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room.” He added, “There’s nothing more ‘America First’ than making sure that our chips don’t go to our enemies to use against us.”

The doomer label that Nvidia has weaponized has its roots in a philosophical movement called effective altruism, or E.A., which sprang up almost two decades ago with the hope of remaking philanthropy by focusing on how many people benefit from donations or other actions. Some effective altruists decided they could benefit humanity by protecting it from A.I.

But Washington’s history of restricting technology sales to China is an outgrowth of hawkish Republican national security policy, not tech philosophy, said David Feith, who led technology policy on the National Security Council from January until April.

“It’s misleading to suggest that U.S. government support for semiconductor and A.I. export controls on China originates with anything left wing or E.A.-associated,” Mr. Feith said. “It’s not true.”

Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general counsel, has helped lead the charge against chip restrictions. In late July, he scheduled a call with Senate staff after the Trump administration reversed its own ban on Nvidia’s sales of a chip known as the H20 to China, according to two people familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss the call.

The staff members raised concerns the sales could endanger U.S. economic and military leadership in A.I. But Mr. Teter dismissed the criticism as “A.I. doomerism.”

Nvidia said the amendment’s text, which would limit sales to countries with an arms embargo, like China, and ones with a close relationship to such countries, was overly broad. In a statement, John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said the H20 is a commercial product, not a military tool.

“President Trump’s A.I. Action Plan recognizes that America wins when U.S. industry sets the global standard for A.I. and computing infrastructure,” Mr. Rizzo said. Referring to former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., he added, “Although America has turned the page on Biden’s A.I. policy, the E.A.-aligned special interests continue to use doomer science fiction to push failed policies that will only undercut U.S. leadership worldwide.”

David Sacks, the White House A.I. czar, has amplified Nvidia’s attacks. In public appearances and on his “All-In” podcast, he has called supporters of A.I. regulation members of a “doomer cult” and said they should be “Loomered,” meaning that Laura Loomer, a far-right agitator who has lobbied President Trump to fire employees, should get them dismissed.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Sacks declined to comment.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, and Mr. Sacks have argued that the best way to stay ahead of China is to sell it more U.S. chips, making Chinese companies more reliant on U.S. technology.

That idea has challenged years of government policy and national security research that has championed limiting Nvidia’s technology sales because of concerns that it will help Beijing’s military and A.I. developers.

The first Trump administration embraced restrictions on technology sales to China, with actions like blocking Google and others from providing technology to the Chinese tech giant Huawei. By 2021, congressional Republicans, including Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, were pressing the Biden administration to tighten restrictions on technology sales to China.

Nvidia and Mr. Sacks have been particularly pointed in their criticism of RAND Corporation, a federally funded think tank that does national security research on semiconductors and other subjects, said four people familiar with their lobbying efforts who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the conversations were private.

Nvidia has focused some of its criticisms on Jason Matheny, a deputy assistant to President Biden on technology and national security who is now chief executive of RAND.

Mr. Matheny was a researcher in the early 2000s at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, which developed many of the ideas behind effective altruism. He is among people with ties to the movement who have worked with foreign-policy experts in recent years. And RAND has received millions of dollars in funding from Open Philanthropy, an effective altruist organization backed by Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder.

Leah Polk, a RAND spokeswoman, said the organization had done research and analysis for 80 years, “not advocacy.”

“We are not A.I. ‘doomers’ or ‘accelerationists,’” she said. “We don’t lobby for policy positions, and we won’t comment on the lobbying activity of others.”

Nvidia’s complaints about RAND have contributed to the dismissal of at least one member of the Commerce Department’s administrative staff who was partly paid by RAND, said five people familiar with the dismissal who spoke anonymously because it was a personnel matter. The staff member was dismissed after Nvidia complained that licenses were not being granted for its chip sales to China, these people said.

A Commerce Department spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Oren Cass, the founder of American Compass, a conservative think tank, who supports the proposed export rules, finds it absurd that critics of selling A.I. chips to China have been called doomers. He’s a father of three who plays basketball on Sunday, he said, not someone who thinks about A.I. science fiction.

“As a matter of critical thinking, it doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Cass said. “The argument of prioritizing the U.S. for advanced A.I. chips has nothing to do with doomerism. Either you don’t understand that or you’re trying to confuse and mislead people.”

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