Amna Nawaz:
President Trump stunned many in the tech world after announcing a controversial deal with chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, allowing them to sell advanced artificial intelligence chips to China in exchange for giving the U.S. government a 15 percent cut of their revenue.
Now there are questions about the legality of this deal and its implications for national security and beyond.
For more on this, I’m joined by Scott Kennedy, senior adviser in Chinese business and economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Scott, welcome, and thanks for joining us.
Let’s just start with your take on this deal itself. For the U.S. to be taking a 15 percent cut of these private companies’ sales to China, is there precedent for it and is it legal?
Scott Kennedy, Center for Strategic and International Studies: I have never heard of a deal like this as long as I have been watching U.S.-government business relations or the tech industry, the U.S. government taking a cut of exports.
I think it’s pretty unprecedented. We know the president is a source of a lot of creative ideas. I don’t think this is necessarily the best one that he’s come up with. It has huge implications for the semiconductor industry and actually all of high tech, as well as the export control regime as well.
