BIS Final Rule Eases H200/MI325X AI-Chip Exports to China (Presumption-of-Denial → Case-by-Case) With 25% 'Trump Surcharge'; China Then Blocks Imports

Effective January 15, 2026, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security published a final rule (Federal Register 2026-00789) shifting the export-license review posture for NVIDIA H200- and AMD MI325X-equivalent AI chips to China and Macau from “presumption of denial” to case-by-case review — chips below 21,000 total processing performance / 6,500 GB/s DRAM bandwidth qualify (next-gen Blackwell stays denied). Conditions: a 50% cap on China/Macau shipments, KYC procedures, independent US security testing, and — the capture detail — a 25% US-government fee (“Trump surcharge”) collected on H200 exports. Commerce cleared ~10 Chinese firms (Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance) for up to 75,000 units each; Chinese orders reportedly exceeded 2 million chips for 2026. By May 2026, however, no deliveries had occurred — Lutnick said Beijing was blocking imports to steer investment toward Huawei.

This is a second face of the AI-governance selective-regulation pattern, and it sharpens the deregulation-asymmetry finding by contrast. The same Commerce Department that on June 12, 2026 wielded export-control authority to shut down a US firm’s models worldwide (2026-06-12–commerce-export-control-order-forces-anthropic-to-suspend-fable-5-mythos-5-worldwide) had, five months earlier, loosened export controls to ship frontier chips to Chinese tech giants — while skimming a 25% federal surcharge off the top. Export-control authority is applied not by a consistent national-security principle but selectively: loosened where it generates revenue and favors chip-sales, tightened where it targets a disfavored AI firm. The 25% surcharge also instances the forced-government-equity / revenue-capture pattern already documented for Lutnick (2025-09-10–lutnick-forces-corporate-govt-equity). Sits in the AI-governance arc with 2026-06-02–eo-promoting-advanced-ai-innovation-security-voluntary-framework-shortened-prerelease-window and 2025-12-11–eo-14365-ai-preemption-doj-litigation-task-force-against-state-ai-laws. Surfaced 2026-06-14 by the re-sweep after the AI-governance lane was added.