Amrith Ramkumar and Robbie Whelan, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices have agreed to give the Trump administration a portion of the sales from their artificial-intelligence chips to China, unusual agreements that deepen their relationships with the U.S. government.

The Trump administration will receive 15% of the sales as part of a deal to approve exports of Nvidia’s H20 AI chip to China, according to people familiar with the matter. That could amount to billions of dollars given demand for the H20 chips and is the latest example of the White House employing novel tactics to raise revenue. The administration has reached the same agreement with AMD for its MI308 chip, the people said. Details of the arrangements and the financial structures are still being worked out.

Tripp Mickle, reporting on the same story for The New York Times (also a gift link):

Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15 percent of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a highly unusual financial agreement with the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said. [...]

There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Mr. Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies. In June, the administration approved investment by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, in U.S. Steel in a deal that included a so-called golden share in the company, a rarely used practice where the government takes a stake in a business.

Unusual agreements is quite the euphemism for a shakedown. US companies pay the Treasury a share of their revenue all the time, of course. That’s called taxation. But taxes are laws, written by Congress. There’s no tax here. Congress has played zero role whatsoever in these deals.

CNN, today:

President Donald Trump defended a deal he struck with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to allow the sale of certain semiconductor chips to China in exchange for the company giving the U.S. government 15 percent of the revenue.

“I said, ‘I want 20 percent if I’m going to approve this for you,’” Trump told reporters Monday during a White House press conference. “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself. … And he said, ‘Would you make it 15?‘ So we negotiate a little deal.”

The tell here, revealing just how fucked up this whole thing is getting, is that Trump felt the need to say “For the country, for our country. I don’t want it myself.”