Howard Lutnick Doesn’t Want to Stop the Flow of Nvidia Chips Overseas: Report - Gizmodo

Lutnick's stance signals a strategic pivot from blanket prohibition to calibrated selectivity — not deregulation, but a recalibration of leverage. The 2022 export control episode taught Washington a costly lesson: indiscriminate restrictions accelerated domestic substitution in ways that eroded long-term market dominance. Huawei's Ascend 910B reached production scale within 18 months of the ban; SMIC's 7nm yield trajectory exceeded projections. When the Commerce Department shifts from block to channel, Nvidia's H20 and B30 SKUs regain access to Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American inference markets. But the real contest isn't the silicon — it's HBM3E allocation and CoWoS packaging priority. AMD and Intel will exploit this window to capture mid-tier inference workloads that Nvidia strategically deprioritizes. Meanwhile, Chinese design houses will use the compliance gray zone to iterate architectures ahead of the next tightening cycle. Over the next 18 months, expect export controls to migrate from product-level to IP-core-level restrictions — the question won't be which chip ships, but which microarchitecture license can be taped out.