Nvidia, now the largest corporation in the world, just received the green light from the Trump administration to resume sales of its H20 AI chips to China—marking a dramatic reversal from April’s export restrictions.
The H20 Chip and Its Limits
The H20 is a scaled-down version of Nvidia’s top-tier AI chips, specifically engineered to comply with U.S. export controls. It’s powerful enough to handle AI “inference” tasks but falls short of the benchmarks used to train cutting-edge models—making it legally exportable.
Policy Flip
In April, the administration clamped down, requiring special licenses for H20 exports over fears that even these reduced-performance chips might be leveraged for strategic military or surveillance purposes. Nvidia warned that the move could cost billions. Then came intensive lobbying efforts—including a high-profile dinner between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. By July, the administration reversed course. Nvidia began filing applications to resume shipments with confidence that licenses would be granted.
Strategic Importance
China represents a substantial share of global demand for AI chips. This policy reversal carries enormous implications not only for Nvidia but for the broader question of technological rivalry and national security. As Huang put it, “Half the world’s AI researchers are in China”—making it clear that U.S. companies cannot afford to be absent from such a vital and dynamic market. The move could reshape the global AI supply chain and ease tensions in an intensifying semiconductor trade war.
The Reversal Rationale
At its core, this shift illustrates a tension between national security imperatives and economic priorities—and for now, economics appears to have won.
- In April, the administration invoked national security concerns, fearing that H20 chips could empower Chinese supercomputers or frontier models like DeepSeek R12.
- Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick summed it up sharply: “Of course they want them. And of course we said ‘absolutely not.’”
- Concerns also emerged around potential smuggling and third-party transshipment.
By July, the landscape shifted. Nvidia’s pledge to invest $500 billion in domestic AI infrastructure may have helped reframe the company as a strategic asset rather than a liability in the administration’s eyes.
A Delicate Balancing Act
This pivot reflects deeper fault lines in U.S. tech policy. On one side, national security hawks push for rigid restrictions to blunt China's AI momentum. On the other side, industry leaders warn that overregulation risks isolating American firms and ceding global influence. The chips didn’t change—but the political calculus did. The administration is betting that economic leverage and domestic investment can coexist with strategic caution. Skeptics, though, see only a temporary détente.
Rare Earths: The Hidden Chess Piece
Behind the scenes, China’s rare earth diplomacy may have helped tip the scales.
- Beijing recently relaxed export controls on these critical materials, essential for semiconductors, EVs, and military tech.
- This softening coincided with the U.S. lifting restrictions on chip design software and allowing Nvidia to resume H20 sales.
It’s difficult to prove direct causality, but the timing suggests a mutual de-escalation. Washington likely viewed China’s flexibility as an opening to stabilize supply chains and avoid driving Beijing toward self-sufficiency or alternative suppliers like Russia. Even Huang emphasized the importance of preserving U.S. influence in China’s AI ecosystem—an objective threatened by rising trade barriers.
Looking Ahead
While nothing is conclusive, it’s clear that rare earth policy is part of the larger chessboard—a subtle but significant backdrop to Nvidia’s reentry. What comes next—whether related to tariffs, TikTok, or the broader balance of power between the world’s two largest economies—is almost certain to reshape the global tech landscape.
Stay tuned.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.