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The US commerce department has proposed requirements that nations whose companies want to buy large volumes of Nvidia and AMD chips for AI data centres would have to commit to invest in America.
The draft rule, which could change after an inter-agency review, creates a tiered process for approving exports based on the total computing power of the chips sold to a company.
The top tier would require the home country of buyers to invest in US domestic AI infrastructure, according to people who have read the rule.
Some people familiar with the proposal said it was designed to enable the US to approve advanced chip export deals similar to arrangements that the Trump administration last year agreed with the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
The commerce department in November approved the export of chips to the UAE’s G42 and Saudi Arabia’s Humain in deals that will help the countries boost domestic AI data centre capacity in exchange for pledges to invest in America.
Nvidia stock fell as much as 2 per cent after Bloomberg first reported the proposed rule on Thursday, before recovering.
“Any rule that the administration issues will promote the American tech stack,” said one US official.
The commerce department said: “We successfully advanced exports through our historic Middle East agreements, and there are ongoing internal government discussions about formalising that approach.”
It also pushed back against reports that the administration was adopting a version of the AI diffusion rule unveiled in the final months of Joe Biden’s administration. That rule created a system of export controls for advanced chips that was tiered based on country risk.
“Today there was reporting that we were returning to the AI diffusion rule,” the commerce department said. “We will not. It was burdensome, over-reaching and disastrous.”
The proposed rule creates a tiered process of approvals based on the volume of chips a foreign company wants to buy.
In some cases, the company would be required to hold informal consultations with the US government before Nvidia or AMD could apply for licences to export advanced chips to those customers.
One person familiar with the situation said other agencies had been asked to respond to the commerce department proposal over the next week.
The rule would have no bearing on the export of high-end chips to US adversaries such as China, which are covered by separate export controls.
But they come as the government is still debating what conditions to attach to licences to let Nvidia sell H200 chips to China. President Donald Trump told the company’s chief executive Jensen Huang several months ago that his administration would approve licences for the exports.
As a condition for getting the green light for H200 exports, Huang agreed that Nvidia would give 25 per cent of the revenues from their sale to the US government.
Nvidia declined to comment.