AI Chips for China: US Government Must Sell Export Tax as Import Duty
The US Constitution prohibits export taxes. A security review is intended to open a loophole to allow duties on Nvidia's AI chips.
(Image: Nvidia)
The US government apparently has to come up with a customs construct to profit from Nvidia's AI accelerators for China as planned. The Wall Street Journal draws attention to an article in the US Constitution that prohibits export taxes or duties on exports from all states.
According to a US Supreme Court ruling on the so-called export clause, all taxes that "directly burden the export process" are illegal. However, the US government wants a flat 25 percent of the revenue that Nvidia generates with H200 accelerators for Chinese customers. To achieve this, the US wants to relax the existing export restrictions.
So far, US companies are only allowed to sell slow AI accelerators to China, officially for security reasons, as the Chinese military could use the hardware for its own AI training. Nvidia has, for example, released the H20 with a fraction of the computing power of an H200 for China. The H200 would be faster than anything Chinese manufacturers can deliver, including Huawei. Only the newer Blackwell generation (B200/B300) remains withheld from China.
Export tax billed as import?
The Wall Street Journal quotes government officials as saying that H200 accelerators for China must undergo a security review in the US. The idea behind it apparently is: the semiconductors come from the chip contract manufacturer TSMC in Taiwan to the US, where the government collects an import duty before they are shipped on to China.
It is unclear what a security review might look like. If it were about control, Nvidia could also have the intended H200 chips manufactured entirely in the US. TSMC has a suitable semiconductor factory in Arizona and is already manufacturing for Nvidia there. US packaging service provider Amkor works locally with TSMC to place GPUs and HBM memory components on common carriers and test the hardware for functionality.
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Pushback from China
Meanwhile, the Chinese government seems to want to prevent domestic companies from buying only Nvidia hardware. Among others, the Financial Times reports that China is currently considering an approval process. In this process, companies would have to explain why locally manufactured AI chips are not sufficient for their own purposes.
Huawei, for example, offers the Cloudmatrix 384 system, which is intended to compete with Nvidia in terms of the number of Ascend 910C accelerators. Chinese chip contract manufacturer SMIC and likely Huawei itself are producing the chips because TSMC is no longer allowed to supply them.
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