Nvidia scores a Washington win as Congress backs away from chip export limits
Nvidia just pulled off one of its most significant political victories of the year. After weeks of pressure from industry rivals, China hawks and AI safety advocates, US lawmakers opted not to include the GAIN AI Act in a must-pass defence bill.
The proposal would have forced Nvidia and AMD to give American buyers priority access to high-performance AI chips before selling to China or any nation under an arms embargo.
A person familiar with the bill told Bloomberg that the measure is not included in the legislation that is due to be released on Friday.
The decision follows an intense lobbying push from Nvidia, which argued that mandatory prioritisation rules would undermine global competition and were unnecessary because the company had no intention of withholding advanced hardware from domestic customers.
The stakes were high enough that CEO Jensen Huang travelled to Washington on Wednesday to meet President Donald Trump and senior lawmakers. Speaking outside Speaker Mike Johnson’s office, Huang said he was there to “answer questions about AI.”
When he later called the exclusion of GAIN AI “wise,” he made clear that Nvidia saw the proposal as more damaging than the AI Diffusion Act, another policy the company has opposed.
The fight comes as the White House weighs whether to allow exports of Nvidia’s H200, the most capable US AI chip currently subject to licensing rules. Trump has previously floated sending downgraded versions of the Blackwell processor abroad, though several Cabinet officials remain opposed.
At the same time, White House AI chief David Sacks has repeatedly suggested that exporting more US chips to China could strengthen American leadership by locking Beijing into US-controlled supply chains.
That argument has met resistance. Advocates of GAIN AI warn that unrestricted sales of advanced chips could boost China’s economic and military capabilities, raising national security concerns in a field already defined by geopolitical tension.
They view stricter controls not as protectionism but as a hedge against the rapid diffusion of transformative compute power.
For now, Nvidia has what it wanted: time and room to sell its most advanced systems without new statutory constraints. But the debate is not over. As pressure builds over the H200 licensing decision and lawmakers revisit export policy in 2026, the company may find that Washington wins rarely last long.
