Trump's H200 approval shows the limits of US tech decoupling

The Trump administration's decision to allow Nvidia's H200 AI chips to be sold to China, while taking 25 percent of the sales revenue for the US government, is not a goodwill gesture but a calculated adjustment. Two years of tight export controls have failed to slow China's AI progress; instead, they have pushed Chinese firms to speed up work on homegrown chips and a full tech stack, raising the risk that US companies could lose the world’s second-largest AI market and their influence there. For China, the twists from bans to partial approvals only confirm that the path of self-reliant development in core technologies is the right one: only by keeping key technologies and development capacity firmly in its own hands can it retain real strategic options, whatever happens in the external environment.