US must deny China cutting-edge technology, ex-commerce secretary says

One of the architects of former US President Joe Biden’s tech export controls warned on Thursday that Washington needs better coordination with allies to deny China access to high-end chips and cutting-edge products, criticising a plan by US President Donald Trump’s administration to allow sales of certain Nvidia chips.

Citing Beijing’s massive spending on efforts to establish China’s technological leadership, former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo said in a panel discussion at the Council on Foreign Relations that the US government should do it in a more precise way to achieve a balance between corporate and economic security interests.

“Export controls are like a very powerful tool in the toolkit that the US government has. And I think they should be used with their allies in a precise way to deny China the most cutting-edge technology that we have, that they don’t,” she said.

“I believe now we have better, more sophisticated chips and we shouldn’t allow them to have it at the end of the day.”

Raimondo made the comments when asked about the resumption of Nvidia’s H20 chip sales to China in July. The Trump administration granted export licenses for some Nvidia chips to China in exchange for 15 per cent of the revenues, a move that ran aground after Beijing stepped up national security scrutiny of the product.

  

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