A bipartisan group of senators is pressuring President Trump to maintain strict export controls that prevent Nvidia from selling its most powerful AI chips to China. The resolution, led by Sens. Chris Coons and Tom Cotton, comes just days after Trump appeared to waver on the restrictions, highlighting the growing political tension over America's tech dominance.
The AI chip wars just got more political. A bipartisan Senate resolution filed Wednesday is putting direct pressure on President Trump to maintain export restrictions that keep Nvidia's most advanced processors out of Chinese hands - and it couldn't come at a more critical moment.
The resolution, spearheaded by Sens. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), with support from Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Dave McCormick (R-PA), arrives just days after Trump walked back comments suggesting he might allow Nvidia to sell its powerful Blackwell chip in China. The timing isn't coincidental - it's a direct response to what senators see as wavering resolve on America's most crucial tech advantage.
"We cannot allow China to leap ahead of us and bolster their weapons capabilities, maximize their cyberattacks against American industry, and threaten long-term U.S. economic and national security," Senator Coons said in a statement accompanying the resolution. The language is stark, reflecting growing bipartisan alarm about China's rapid AI progress.
The resolution specifically calls out China's "efforts to close the AI gap and leap ahead" of the US in developing frontier AI models. More telling, it identifies China's "inability to make and access computing power" as the main barrier to its progress - essentially arguing that export controls are working exactly as intended.
But Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's recent comments suggest the window may be closing. In a revealing interview with The Financial Times this week, Huang made a stunning admission: "China is going to win the AI race," citing lower energy costs and fewer regulations. He later clarified on social media that China is just "nanoseconds behind America in AI."
Those aren't the words senators want to hear from America's most important chip company. The comments came as Chinese AI startup DeepSeek continues to with cost-efficient models that rival offerings - proving that innovation can sometimes trump raw computing power.
