
How Arm is gaining chip dominance with its architecture in Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Amazon, Qualcomm and more
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Behind the scenes of every chipmaker, there’s a set of instructions that dictates how their products will function. Over the last three decades, Arm has become the dominant company making this chip architecture, and it powers nearly every smartphone today. Apple bases its custom silicon for iPhones and MacBooks on Arm, and now Nvidia and AMD are reportedly making Arm-based PC chips, too.
Arm’s blockbuster IPO in September valued it above $54 billion, thanks in part to the growing list of companies choosing Arm over Intel‘s rival x86 architecture.
On Wednesday, it beat Wall Street expectations in its first post-IPO earnings report, with revenue up 28% on an annual basis during the quarter. Still, revenue guidance fell short of expectations, sending Arm shares down more than 7% in extended trading.
The UK-based company sells licenses for its chip architecture to companies that make central processing units, or CPUs. It also collects royalties on every chip shipped with its technology. Haas says that number topped 30 billion last year. Its customers are the biggest names in tech and chips, including Apple, Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
“Most people think about a device. Then maybe if they’re really sophisticated, they think about the chip, but they don’t think about the company that came up with the original ideas behind how that chip operates,” said Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. “But once you do understand what they do, it’s absolutely amazing the influence they have.”
Arm enables chips to use less power than those made with x86. Lately, it’s seen a big surge in adoption.
Arm is the basis for Apple’s custom processors, which have replaced Intel chips in Macs. Amazon Web Services bases its custom server chips on Arm. Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon chips are also Arm-based, and getting ready to make a meaningful move into the PC market.
But Arm has also faced plenty of risks in recent years. About 20% of its revenue comes from China, according to the company. Smartphones, which almost all contain Arm processors, are seeing a major sales slump. And when Nvidia tried to buy Arm for $40 billion, the deal was blocked by regulators last year.
“That didn’t go the way that everyone anticipated or hoped that it would. But the sun comes up the next day, right? And you have to be able to build from that,” CEO Rene Haas told CNBC in an interview in October.
CNBC went to Arm’s headquarters in Cambridge, England, to find out how it became the year’s biggest IPO despite struggling smartphone sales and geopolitical uncertainty.
From smartphones to AI
Arm was founded in 1990 by 12 chip designers working out of a turkey barn in Cambridge. It was originally a joint venture between Apple, Acorn Computers, and VLSI, which is now part of NXP.
Arm’s big break came in 1993, when Apple launched its early handheld Newton device on the Arm610 processor. Haas said this gets at the “hallmarks” of the company. “We were born running a device off a battery that was going to be low cost,” he said.
Arm’s big break came in 1993 when Apple released its handheld Newton device on the Arm610 processor.
Arm Holdings
That same year, Arm struck a deal with Texas Instruments, putting its processors in early Nokia mobile phones and beginning Arm’s climb to become the dominant smartphone architecture it is today. Arm went public for the first time in 1998. Chief architect Richard Grisenthwaite was there.
“We were about 100 people, and I’ve been very much involved in this tremendous transition that the company has gone through, expanding out from being targeting one particular market area into a wide range of different computing environments,” Grisenthwaite said.
Indeed, Arm grew rapidly in the 2000s, with the first touchscreen phones introduced in 2007 and the growth of connected home devices in the 2010s.
Arm now has some 6,500 employees globally. Grisenthwaite said the majority of those employees are in the UK, and about a sixth are in the U.S., where Arm has offices in Arizona, California, North Carolina and Texas. It also has locations in Norway, Sweden, France and India.
In 2016, Arm once again became a private company when Japan’s SoftBank acquired it for $32 billion. Haas was president of the IP products group at the time, spearheading diversification into emerging markets, including AI.
“PC and phone, automotive, data center and IoT. Those are the primary markets that we address. Every single one of those markets has AI embedded in some way, shape or form,” he said.
Arm has some 6,800 patents worldwide, with another 2,700 applications pending. Some of those are for Arm’s Neoverse line for high-performance and cloud computing, which has helped it break into AI since its launch in 2018.
In August, Nvidia announced its latest Grace Hopper Superchip, which couples its own GPUs with Arm’s Neoverse cores.
“By bringing those together and tightly coupling the way that Nvidia has with the Grace Hopper, they’re able to come up with something that’s something like 2 to 4 times the performance of what you’d get on an x86 system for a similar amount of power,” Grisenthwaite explained.
Cash and competition
If you rewind just a couple years, Nvidia’s interest in Arm went far beyond technology integration. Arm owner Softbank needed cash after losing money on high-profile investments in companies like WeWork and Uber. In 2020, SoftBank struck a deal with Nvidia to sell Arm for $40 billion. Eighteen months later, the deal fell apart, blocked by regulators and some of Arm’s biggest customers, which also compete with Nvidia.
Haas said he was, “Disappointed it didn’t happen just because we spent so much time on it.”
Instead, Softbank announced plans to take Arm public again and Haas took over as CEO.
Arm CEO Rene Haas talks with CNBC’s Katie Tarasov in San Jose, California, on October 12, 2023.
Katie Brigham
Arm made its second public debut this September, climbing nearly 25% that day.
The stock has fallen significantly since then.
One risk comes from a free, open-source rival architecture called RISC-V. It’s seen a recent surge in backing from some of Arm’s big customers like Google, Samsung and Qualcomm, which may have been seeking alternatives when it looked like Nvidia was going to buy Arm.
For now, RISC-V remains a low risk competitor according to Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman.
“RISC-V sits a few years behind where Arm is at, and I don’t think we’re going to hear a lot about it right away. I do think in low power, in IoT, in simpler designs, that RISC-V does have some traction,” Newman said.
Arm’s bigger competition comes from x86. Developed by Intel in the 70s, x86 is the dominant architecture used for PC processors, with a massive amount of software developed for it.
“The amount of software support is the thing that actually tends to determine the success or failure of that in the long run. Intel was very good early on with getting a ton of software support for x86,” O’Donnell explained.
Most servers have also traditionally been based on x86, but O’Donnell said that could shift.
“What’s happened in the server market is that the software has been componentized. It’s broken up into containers and things like that, and that makes it easier to run on other architectures like Arm,” he said.
Amazon Web Services is a big player making Arm-based server chips. AWS launched its Graviton chips to rival x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel in 2018.
“And really from there, Arm went from this mobile, low power IoT, automotive specialty embedded to holy cow, we can build next generation servers, PCs, and of course continue on this massive run of silicon for smartphones, all based on Arm,” Newman said.
‘If Apple can do it, can others?’
Apple is the big partner helping Arm break into the laptop market.
Apple moved to its own Arm-based processors in Mac computers in 2020, breaking away from the Intel x86 processors that had powered them for 15 years.
In October, Apple announced its latest line of M3 processors and the MacBooks and iMacs running on them. Apple said Arm-based M3 gives the newest MacBook up to 22 hours of battery life.
“Nobody really believed, until Apple went all in and basically cut ties with x86 instruction sets and said, ‘We are going to bet the future of the Mac on Arm.’ And that was a huge inflection for the company. It was a change of the guard. And this isn’t to say that Intel’s future is in big trouble, but it certainly started to raise some question marks as to, well, if Apple can do it, can others?” Newman said.
In September, Apple extended its deal with Arm through at least 2040.
Qualcomm is another major customer making its latest PC processors using Arm, although that relationship is strained. Arm is suing Qualcomm over the right to make certain chips with its technology. The issues started after Qualcomm acquired CPU company Nuvia in 2021, and with it, Nuvia’s Arm license.
“Nuvia was actually supposed to be designing a server chip initially, so they had different terms with them. And so Qualcomm thought they could have the same terms. Arm felt no, different companies have different terms. And it’s boiled down to essentially that: legal discussions around what those terms ought to be,” O’Donnell explained.
The case is set to go to trial in 2024.
Arm is also growing in the automotive space. Although its chips have long been in cars, it’s now a rapid growth area with the rise of self-driving capabilities and partnerships with companies like Cruise.
Arm’s Grisenthwaite calls self-driving “one of the most computationally intensive tasks we’ve ever seen on this planet.”
“What we need to provide is a standard platform to allow the world’s software developers to really concentrate on this incredibly hard task going forward,” he said, while demonstrating the AVA developer platform, which brings multiple self-driving components together to function on a single processor.
This simplification is also making Arm the choice for non-chip companies like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft designing their own custom silicon.
“They’ve got a smaller team than entire companies built on that. And so you have to make that process easier and simpler. And that, for example, is where Arm is starting to move in terms of enabling the design of multiple components that connect together,” O’Donnell said.
Arm Holdings headquarters in Cambridge, England, on October 3, 2023.
Max Thurlow
‘China is a good market for us’
Although more companies are making inroads into semiconductor design, the recent chip shortage exposed major concern over the fact that more than 90% of the world’s chips are manufactured in Asia.
Now China and the U.S. are going back and forth imposing export controls on chip technologies. For now, Arm says it’s seen minimal impact from the export controls.
“What we do is obviously comply with all kinds of export regulations whenever they come out. Of course we comply. China is a good market for us: about 20% of our business. It’s shifted over the years. It used to be largely mobile phone based. Now it’s mostly around the data center and automotive,” Haas said.
In 2018, SoftBank broke off Arm’s China business into an independent entity, Arm China, that’s majority owned by a group of Chinese investors.
Haas explained further, “It’s essentially to allow us to not only grow our business in China, which is our essentially base core business. We set up a distributor arm, but at the same time, we also created an R&D arm that allows an independent entity to develop products specifically for the China market, some that are Arm based but some that are not Arm based.”
Arm China has also been embroiled in controversy, with SoftBank and Arm trying to oust the CEO of the China business, Allen Wu. Despite being fired, Wu refused to leave for years.
“It’s been very ugly and kind of messy and confusing,” O’Donnell said.
Now, several former Arm China employees are starting a new internal chip design company in China with backing from Shenzhen’s government. Arm’s stock slid more than 5% on the news, but O’Donnell said it’s not an immediate risk.
“A lot of Chinese companies have long standing relationships with Arm, so the expectation is they’re going to want to work there because they have that huge base of software. If somebody creates a new architecture, they have to build the software, and that takes years and years and years,” he said.
Arm also faces some risk from the major slump in smartphone sales.
“We’re not as impacted as folks might think because one of the trends we’ve seen, particularly in smartphones, is more and more Arm processors that go into those phones,” Haas said. “So for us, we’ve actually seen an increase in royalty per phone.
Labor is another challenge across the industry. The world’s chip leader, TSMC, is blaming a shortage of skilled workers for delays at its $40 billion fab under construction in Arizona.
“It’s hard for our whole industry because there’s no way that demand for semiconductors in the next 10 to 15 years will abate. It’s only going to increase. So it’s a pretty fierce talent war,” Haas said.
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Technology
DoorDash CEO Tony Xu is taking on the role of industry consolidator in food delivery
Published
7 hours agoon
May 31, 2025By
admin
Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash Inc., smiles during the Wall Street Journal Tech Live conference in Laguna Beach, California, on Oct. 22, 2019.
Martina Albertazzi | Bloomberg | Getty Images
During the depths of the Covid pandemic, with restaurants around the country facing an existential crisis, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu had an unconventional proposal. He wanted to cut commissions.
Chief Business Officer Keith Yandell worried that such a move would result in a massive hit to profits ahead of the company’s planned IPO. But Xu made a persuasive case.
“If restaurants don’t thrive, we cannot,” Yandell told CNBC in a recent interview, recalling Xu’s perspective at the time. “We need to take a leadership position.”
The company ended up sacrificing over $100 million in fees, Xu later said.
Since starting DoorDash on the campus of Stanford University in 2013, the now 40-year-old CEO has navigated the notoriously cutthroat and low-margin business of food delivery, building a company that Wall Street today values at close to $90 billion. The stock has emerged as a tech darling this year, jumping 23%, while the Nasdaq is still down for the year largely on tariff concerns.
More than four years after its IPO, net profits remain slim. But that’s not getting in the way of Xu’s mission to become an industry consolidator, using a combination of cash and new debt to fuel an acquisition spree at a time when big tech deals remain scarce. Earlier this month, DoorDash scooped up British food delivery startup Deliveroo for about $3.9 billion and restaurant technology company SevenRooms for $1.2 billion.
“What we’ve delivered for a customer yesterday probably isn’t good enough for what we will deliver for them today,” Xu told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” after the deals were announced.
This week DoorDash announced the pricing of $2.5 billion in convertible debt, and said the proceeds could be used in part for acquisitions.
Doordash food delivery service in New York City on Feb. 13, 2025.
Danielle DeVries | CNBC
The San Francisco-based company has a history with scooping up competitors to grow market share. In 2019, it bought food delivery competitor Caviar for $410 million from Square, now known as Block. About two years later, DoorDash said it was paying $8.1 billion for international delivery platform Wolt. The deal was its last big transaction until this month.
When DoorDash entered the food delivery market, it had to face off against the likes of GrubHub and Seamless, which later joined forces. That combined entity was bought late last year by restaurant owner Wonder Group. In 2014, Uber launched Uber Eats, which is now DoorDash’s biggest competitor in the U.S.
“It’s a very competitive market, and I think merchants do have choice,” Xu said in the CNBC interview. “What we’re focused on is always trying to innovate and bring new products to match increasing standards and expectations from customers.”
DoorDash didn’t make Xu available for an interview for this story, but provided a statement about the company’s acquisition strategy.
“We’re very picky, very patient, and conscious that, for most companies, deals don’t work out in hindsight,” the company said. “When we see an opportunity that brings value to customers, expands our potential to empower local economies around the world, and has a path to strong long-term returns on capital, we tend to push our chips in.”
Taking on the suburbs
DoorDash differentiated itself early on by cornering suburban markets that had fewer delivery options, while other players attacked city centers. When Covid shut down restaurant dining in early 2020, DoorDash capitalized on the booming demand for deliveries. Revenue more than tripled that year, and grew 69% in 2021.
Colleagues and early investors credit a customer-first focus for much of Xu’s success. Gokul Rajaram, who joined DoorDash through its Caviar acquisition, described Xu as “the best operational leader in the U.S.” after Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Restaurants haven’t universally viewed DoorDash as an ally. Commissions can reach as high as 30%, which is a hefty cut to fork over. Many restaurants have reluctantly paid the high fees because of DoorDash’s dominant market share, which reached an estimated 67%. In 2021, the company introduced three tiers of pricing, with a basic option at 15% for more price-sensitive businesses.
DoorDash needs the high fees in order to stay in the black. The company’s contribution profit as a percentage of total marketplace volume hovers below 5%.

Colleagues who have known Xu for decades say the food delivery entrepreneur hasn’t changed much since the early days of the company.
Yandell said Xu once took advice from his young daughter, who complained about a routing issue while accompanying him on food delivery orders. All employees, including Xu, are required to complete orders and handle support calls every year as part of the company’s WeDash program.
In a part of the country known for the pomp of its wealthy founders, Xu has a very different reputation.
Early workers recall memories of Xu pulling up in a dilapidated green 2001 Honda Accord to team events, or participating in company knockout basketball games referred to as “knockys,” next to the animal hospital in Palo Alto, which DoorDash briefly called its headquarters. Xu also personally approved every offer for the company’s first 4,000 employees.
Xu spends many mornings answering customer service complaints. He often drops his kids off at school and, after tucking them in at night, hops on calls with international regions, colleagues say. Xu is an avid Gold State Warriors basketball fan but has a soft spot for the Chicago Bulls, having spent many years in Illinois. Once or twice a week, Xu squeezes in a morning run, and will often do so while traveling to explore different neighborhoods and stores.
Xu was born in China and moved with his family to Champaign, Illinois, in 1989. Growing up, he played basketball and mowed lawns to save up for a Nintendo. He told Stanford’s View From the Top podcast in 2021 that the experience, and watching his parents hustle, taught him how to “earn your way into better things.”
His “characteristics became the company’s values,” said Alfred Lin, an early DoorDash investor and partner at venture firm Sequoia.
Xu often attributes his entrepreneurial spirit to his parents. His mother worked as a doctor in China, and juggled three jobs in the U.S. for over a decade, saving up enough to eventually open a medical clinic. His father worked as a waiter while pursuing a Ph.D. Xu said on the podcast that watching his mom gave him a deep understanding of what it takes to run a small business, which came in handy in DoorDash’s early years as he was trying to convert restaurants into customers.
‘Ten times harder’
Employees say Xu has a reputation for detecting hidden talents among his colleagues. Jessica Lachs, the company’s chief analytics officer, was working as a general manager assisting with DoorDash’s Los Angeles launch when Xu guided her toward her passion for data.
“He believes in leaning into the things you’re really good at, rather than trying to be mediocre at a lot of things,” she said.
After Toby Espinosa, DoorDash’s ads vice president, lost a deal with a major fast food company during his early years at the startup, Xu told him to work “10 times harder” and become an expert in his field. A few years later, the company secured the partnership, Espinosa said.
Grit and struggle defined the early years of DoorDash. The founding team of four managed deliveries around Stanford and Palo Alto though a Google Voice number directed to their cellphones.
DoorDash emerged out of a Stanford business school course known as Startup Garage, taught by Professor Stefanos Zenios. The class requires students to present a business idea, test it, and then pitch it to investors.
Zenios said Xu stood out with his data-driven approach and natural leadership qualities. The team tested two different ideas, including a platform that helped small businesses better track the effectiveness of their marketing, he recalls. Zenios called the idea to target suburban areas a “brilliant insight.”
Xu and his team entered Y Combinator in the summer of 2013. The three-month startup accelerator program is known for spawning companies like Airbnb, Stripe and Reddit. Every session culminates with a demo day in front of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors.
The DoorDash idea excited Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and a partner at Y Combinator. But like many other potential investors, Buchheit was skeptical about the economic model.
“You had a talented team of founders working on what I thought was an idea that had potential,” he said. “That’s basically the formula for a good startup.”
On pitch day, the company failed to lure any venture firms, but Buchheit later participated as a seed investor.
Shortly after demo day, DoorDash encountered Saar Gur of Charles River Ventures. Gur had been looking for a food delivery platform to back and was conducting due diligence on another company when a friend led him to DoorDash.
By the end of their first meeting, they were “finishing each other’s sentences,” Gur said.
Sequoia’s Lin initially passed on DoorDash after the Y Combinator pitch, but kept in touch with the team. Lin said he wanted to see data that showed the platform could penetrate beyond Stanford and Palo Alto, and retain customers. He ended up leading two institutional rounds, attaining a 20% stake for Sequoia at the time of the IPO.
“Tony always believed that his company would succeed, or they’ll find a way to succeed,” Lin said.
A food delivery messenger is seen in Manhattan.
Luiz C. Ribeiro | New York Daily News | Tribune News Service | Getty Images
Shortly after its Y Combinator stint, DoorDash hit an early roadblock. Following a Stanford football game, a rush of orders bombarded its delivery system causing massive delays, Xu told Y Combinator’s CEO Garry Tan in an interview this year.
The founders refunded the orders and spent the night baking cookies, then driving them to customers early the next morning.
Oren’s Hummus co-owner Mistie Boulton said DoorDash still takes that approach. The team comes to meet with her every quarter and she serves as a beta tester for new products.
The restaurant, which started in Palo Alto and has since expanded to a half-dozen locations across the Bay Area, was one of DoorDash’s first clients, latching onto the opportunity to reach more customers beyond its small establishment that frequently had lines snaking out the door.
“We just fell in love with the idea,” Boulton said. “The number one thing that encouraged and enticed me to want to work with them was Xu’s passion. He really is one of those people that you can count on.”
Wall Street is now counting on Xu’s ability to execute big deals, even with the company having this month surpassed $10 billion in delivery orders worldwide.
The acquisition of Deliveroo, based in London, marks a renewed effort by DoorDash to expand its presence overseas, following the purchase of Finland’s Wolt three years ago.
The cash deal for SevenRooms, a New York City-based data platform for restaurants and hotels to manage booking information, takes DoorDash into an entirely new category. Xu told CNBC that DoorDash is a “multi-product company now that’s operating on a global scale.”
Following the acquisition announcements, which coincided with a disappointing earnings report in March, analysts at Piper Sandler reiterated their hold recommendation on the stock.
One reason for concern, they said, was that “integrating multiple acquisitions at once may create some noise near-term.”
WATCH: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu: Deliveroo & SevenRooms deals make us a multi-product company on a global scale

Technology
Tesla shares set to wrap strong May as Elon Musk ends time with Trump’s DOGE
Published
1 day agoon
May 30, 2025By
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Elon Musk is interviewed on CNBC from the Tesla headquarters in Texas.
CNBC
Shares of the Elon Musk-led automaker Tesla have rallied in May despite recent poor car sales numbers for the company in China and Europe, as the billionaire CEO promised to focus more on his businesses than politics.
Tesla shares are on track for an increase of more than 20% for the month.
The stock is still down about 12% for the year. Apple is down about 21% year-to-date, the worst of all the megacaps.
The bounceback in May comes as President Donald Trump marks the end of Musk’s time as a “special government employee” at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency.
“This will be his last day, but not really, because he will, always, be with us, helping all the way,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Elon is terrific!”
Musk said on the most recent Tesla earnings call that his time spent running DOGE would drop significantly by the end of May, but that he plans to spend a “day or two per week” on government work until the end of Trump’s term.
Musk also planned to keep his office at the White House.
Tesla year to date stock chart
The New York Times reported Friday that while Musk was campaigning for Trump last year, he had been taking drugs “well beyond occasional use” and was “facing an increasingly turbulent family life.”
The Times noted it was unclear if that habit carried over to his time in the White House, when he was also juggling Tesla and the other companies in his business empire — including SpaceX and X owner xAI, his artificial intelligence company.
Tesla’s European sales dropped by half, year-over-year for April.
Tesla sales in China, another massive market for battery electric vehicles, were down by about 25% year over year in the first eight weeks of the current quarter.
The carmaker has faced protests in reaction to Musk’s ties with Trump, and his endorsement of Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD.
Pension fund leaders recently called out Tesla’s board in a letter, demanding that they rein in Musk, and require him to work a minimum of 40 hours a week on Tesla to fix what they called the current “crisis.”
Read more CNBC tech news
Musk and Tesla have tried to re-focus on the company’s prospects in autonomous vehicle tech, humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence.
Bloomberg reported this week that Tesla plans to launch its long-delayed and much anticipated autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service in Austin, Texas, on June 12th.
Tesla has not confirmed that start date, but has been promising to launch a robotaxi ride-hailing service in Austin before the end of June.
Musk told CNBC’s David Faber in a recent interview that Tesla would start with a small fleet of Model Y Tesla vehicles equipped with the company’s newest, Unsupervised Full Self Driving hardware and software.
Musk has been promising investors a robotaxi vehicle for years, and the company has ceded ground to Waymo in the U.S. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi venture recently surpassed 10 million paid, driverless ridehailing trips.
Shares of Tesla have also benefitted from the company’s stronger position, relative to other U.S. automakers when it comes to weathering tariffs.
Tesla operates two massive vehicle assembly plants domestically, one in Fremont, California and another in Austin, Texas, and has more North American-made parts in its cars than most of its competitors.
Technology
China calls out Trump for ‘abuse’ of semiconductor export controls
Published
1 day agoon
May 30, 2025By
admin
Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Dan Kitwoodnicholas Kamm | Afp | Getty Images
China is calling out the U.S. for “discriminatory restrictions” in its use of export controls in the chip industry, after the Trump administration accused the world’s second-largest economy of violating a preliminary trade deal between the two countries.
“Recently, China has repeatedly raised concerns with the U.S. regarding its abuse of export control measures in the semiconductor sector and other related practices,” China U.S. embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu told NBC News.
It’s the latest escalation in the simmering trade war between the U.S. and China, particularly as it pertains to artificial intelligence and the infrastructure needed to develop the most advanced technologies.
China’s response comes after President Donald Trump said early Friday in a social media post that China had violated a trade agreement. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told CNBC in an interview that the “Chinese are slow rolling its compliance.”
On May 12, the U.S. and China agreed to a 90-day suspension on most tariffs imposed by either side. That agreement followed an economic and trade meeting between the two countries in Geneva, Switzerland.
“China once again urges the U.S. to immediately correct its erroneous actions, cease discriminatory restrictions against China and jointly uphold the consensus reached at the high-level talks in Geneva,” the embassy spokesperson said.
The statement didn’t specify any actions taken by the U.S. Earlier this month, China said the U.S. was “abusing” export controls after the U.S. banned American companies from importing or even using Huawei’s AI chips.
The U.S. has limited exports of some chips and chip technology to China as part of a national defense strategy dating back to the first Trump administration.
In 2019, President Trump cut off Huawei’s access to U.S. technology, which forced it to essentially exit the smartphone business for a few years before it could develop its own chips without use of U.S intellectual property or infrastructure. In 2022, the Biden administration first moved to cut off Chinese access to the fastest AI chips made by Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.
The restrictions have intensified of late, and earlier this week, chip software makers, including Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems, said they had received letters from the U.S. Commerce Department telling them to stop selling to China.
Nvidia, which makes the most advanced semiconductors for AI applications, has vocally opposed the U.S. export controls, saying that they would merely force China to develop its own chip ecosystem instead of building around U.S. standards.
Nvidia was told earlier this year that it could no longer sell its H20 chip to China, a restriction that the company said this week would cause it to miss out on about $8 billion in sales in the current quarter. The H20 chip was specifically designed by Nvidia to comply with 2022 restrictions, but the Trump administration said in April that the company needed an export license. Nvidia said it was left with $4.5 billion in inventory it couldn’t reuse.
“The U.S. has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on the company’s earnings call. “That assumption was always questionable, and now it’s clearly wrong.”
The Trump administration did rescind an expansive chip export control rule that was implemented by the Biden administration called the “AI diffusion rule,” which would have placed export caps on most countries. A new and simpler rule is expected in the coming months.

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