President Donald Trump is deciding whether to allow the AI chipmaker Nvidia to sell advanced computer chips to Beijing, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been lobbying the Trump administration to green-light those chip sales, Lutnick said. At the moment, the firm has ceded its market share in China due to persistent tensions between the U.S. and China that haven't been settled due to the lack of a trade agreement.

\\"He's got Jensen from Nvidia, who really wants to sell those chips, and he's got a good reasons for it,\\" Lutnick said in a CNBC interview. \\"There's an enormous number of other people who think that that's something that should be deeply considered.\\"

The chipmaker Nvidia has been caught in the middle of the U.S.-China trade war. The tech giant is best known for manufacturing the computer chips powering the fleet of AI data centers springing up in the U.S. and other parts of the world. If Trump authorizes the sales, it would represent a significant boost for a major tech company already worth $5 trillion after a robust third quarter earnings season.

Nvidia once sold the H20 chip that was specially designed for the Chinese market until the trade war flared up this year. It's an inferior version compared to its series of Blackwell chips, among the most advanced in production today. Bloomberg News reported on Friday that U.S. officials were discussing the possibility of allowing Nvidia to sell another chip to China, the H200.

Lutnick said Trump is weighing the trade-offs between safeguarding national security or boosting the U.S. economy. \\"That is the question, it's in front of the president,\\" he said.

The Biden administration was first in restricting U.S. companies from selling semiconductors to prevent China from gaining an edge in the global race for AI supremacy. Trump kept those policies at the start of his second term, a move supported by nationals security hawks in both the Republican and Democratic parties.

The president, though, unwinded part of those restrictions in July when he signed off on an extraordinary agreement with Nvidia and AMD, another chipmaker, to hand over 15% of the revenue of H20 chip sales in China to the federal government.

The Chinese government responded by discouraging state-owned companies from purchasing or otherwise relying on Nvidia's chips. Huang, who has been closely aligned with Trump, has since said the company hasn't sold any of its products or equipment in China.