John Moolenaar is trying to explain to the Trump administration that the United States government should not be helping the Chinese government to make the weapons that it aims at us. One way the U.S. is doing so is by permitting export to China of Nvidia’s sophisticated H200 microchip.
In a January 28, 2026 letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, cites evidence that Nvidia “provided extensive technical support that enabled DeepSeek—now integrated into People’s Liberation Army systems and a demonstrated cyber security risk—to achieve frontier AI capabilities. These findings demonstrate why rigorous enforcement of the Department’s H200 export rule, which requires certification that chips will not serve military purposes, is essential—even if such enforcement effectively prevents H200 exports to the PRC altogether.”
Arming enemies
Is it in the interest of the United States and its people to let Nvidia improve the military capability of the People’s Liberation Army? It is not.
Nor is there any reasonable alternative to “effectively preventing H200 exports to the PRC altogether.” A thought experiment will show why.
Suppose Nvidia ships a bunch of H200 microchips to a certifiably harmless China-based company, which provides all the proof that Nvidia and U.S. regulators could want that the chips will be used for only the most harmless possible purposes. Nvidia ships the chips. As soon as they arrive, the CCP shows up at the harmless company’s door, confiscates the chips, and trots over to the PLA with them, saying, “Hey, we got hold of some more H200 chips to power your DeepSeek model with. Or the ray guns we’re aiming at the U.S. Or whatever.”
Moolenaar: “As the Committee detailed in its April 2025 report, DeepSeek is not a typical commercial AI system: it routes Americans’ data back to the PRC through infrastructure tied to a U.S.-designated Chinese military company, manipulates outputs to comply with Chinese Communist Party propaganda and censorship mandates, steals intellectual property from frontier U.S. AI firms, and runs on advanced Nvidia chips restricted from export to China.”
If Moolenaar convinces Lutnick, maybe Lutnick can convince President Trump.
The Huang boomerang
The president was against letting the Chinese Communist Party have the H200 chip before he was for it. But then Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang convinced Trump last summer “that American chips should be the global standard and that the United States was making a grave mistake by ceding the giant Chinese market to homegrown rivals.”
These contentions miss the point by several light years.
Moolenaar explains that DeepSeek, which Nvidia is helping to power with the H200 chip, “steals intellectual property from frontier U.S. AI firms.” Would Nvidia’s rivals within China automatically be able to produce the same caliber and sophistication of cutting-edge chip as Nvidia’s H200 without the help of the intellectual property theft enabled, in part, by tech imports like the H200? If China’s domestic chip creators can easily match the H200, why are Chinese companies clamoring for the H200?
But even if China’s chip makers were as good as Nvidia and were making the same caliber of chip, this would not justify helping the PRC aim weapons at us. If a U.S. export to China demonstrably endangers U.S. security, this danger is the paramount consideration. It’s irrelevant whether stopping the security-jeopardizing exports would end up “ceding” the Chinese market “to homegrown rivals.”
What U.S. firms would dare make the argument: “Hey, we’ve got to export our top-of-the line guns and ammunition to the People’s Republic of China, otherwise the U.S. will be ceding the giant Chinese market to homegrown rivals”?
Or: “Hey, we’ve got to export our cutting-edge bioweapons to the PRC, otherwise the U.S. will be ceding the giant Chinese market to homegrown rivals”?
Or: “Hey, we’ve got to export our most powerful nukes to the PRC, otherwise the U.S. will be ceding the giant Chinese market to homegrown rivals”?
