U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday suggested he might allow Nvidia to sell a scaled-down version of its next-generation advanced graphics processing unit chip in China, despite deep-seated fears in Washington that Beijing could harness U.S. artificial intelligence capabilities to supercharge its military. The move could open the door to China securing more advanced computing power from the U.S. even as the two countries battled for technology supremacy, critics said. "Jensen (Huang, Nvidia CEO) also has the new chip, the Blackwell. In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it," Trump told reporters in an apparent reference to slashing the chip's computing power.

IBM wants to develop next-generation artificial intelligence chips, and it's building a new AI research center and partnering with academia and other tech companies to do it. At the recently announced future AI Hardware Center at SUNY Polytechnical Institute in Albany, New York, IBM researchers will collaborate with academic researchers and tech partners to develop, prototype, and test new AI chips and systems. Initial partners include Samsung, Mellanox Technologies, Synopsis, Applied Materials, and Tokyo Electron. Related: Intel Steps Up Its Challenge to Nvidia's AI Chip Dominance, with Facebook's Help The IBM Research division, which has designed several prototypes of its Digital AI cores and Analog AI cores in recent years, will continue to develop these chips at the center, Jeff Burns, IBM Research's director of AI Compute and director of the future AI Hardware Center, said. These new processors are expected to result in a 1,000-times improvement in AI compute performance efficiency over the next 10 years.