OpenAI Has Avoided a Stance on China Chip Exports for Fear of Alienating Nvidia, Report Says

The report is part of a wider investigation by the publication into how Nvidia uses its money and influence to shape the behaviour of its customers and the direction of government policy.

According to The Information, OpenAI leaders including chief executive Sam Altman have expressed concern that taking a stance on export controls for China would alienate the chipmaker. The publication also cited a staffer on Capitol Hill who said that last year, as Congress was turning its attention to export control legislation, a senior OpenAI policy employee privately acknowledged the company had become less vocal on the issue than it had been under the Biden administration because it feared antagonising Huang and Nvidia.

Internal Questions

The tension surfaced inside OpenAI last month, the report said. Noam Brown, a senior research scientist at the company, posted a link in a company Slack channel to a news story about OpenAI's shifting position on advanced chip sales to China and asked: "What is our policy on chip exports?"

Policy leaders replied by pointing to earlier company publications, including a frontier AI safety blueprint released in June, which backed chip export controls in general terms but did not address China specifically, according to The Information. Staff were told to take the discussion to members of the global affairs team who are working on new export control policies rather than continue it on Slack.

Why Nvidia Carries Weight

In an accompanying newsletter, The Information argued that many in Silicon Valley are wary of Huang for practical reasons. Nvidia controls the flow of the chips that model developers need to train and run their most advanced systems, and access to that hardware has been hard to secure. Huang also has the ear of several senior government officials, including President Trump, the publication said.

Nvidia earns significant revenue from Chinese companies and wants access to the Chinese market. It is not allowed to sell its most advanced technology directly into China, though The Information noted that Chinese firms such as ByteDance and DeepSeek still obtain the chips through facilities outside China's borders or through smuggled hardware.

The report did not include a response from OpenAI or Nvidia in the portion available to Nakoda.

Why It Matters

Export controls on AI chips are one of the most consequential policy questions for the industry, shaping where advanced computing can be built and who can buy it, including in the Gulf, where governments and companies are investing heavily in AI infrastructure built on US chips. The report suggests that dependence on a single supplier may be influencing how the largest AI developers engage in that debate, at a time when Nvidia has just regained its position as the world's most valuable company.