Approvals for Nvidia and AMD AI chip exports to China stall under government bottleneck — 20% staff turnover hobbles Bureau of Industry and Security

Staffing at the U.S. Commerce Department office that vets exports of Nvidia and AMD AI accelerators has collapsed over the past year, and approval times for chipmakers are now running into months, Bloomberg has reported.

Citing more than 20 people familiar with the situation, it’s understood that the Bureau of Industry and Security is struggling to process a workload expanded by the Trump administration’s tariff probes and AI chip export reviews, while Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler is insisting on personally examining nearly every license application and telling companies to “simply call him to have a license approved.”

A Bloomberg analysis of Office of Personnel Management figures, LinkedIn profile changes, and agency records found that BIS has shed 101 employees, a 19% reduction, since 2024. Turnover among rulemaking and licensing staff specifically has run at nearly 20%, the outlet said.

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Since late February, top officials at the bureau have been focused on the Iran war, pulling energy away from the technology-export push that shaped the administration's first year, Bloomberg said. The same conflict has pushed Trump's planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping to next month, with AI chip access and rare earth supplies both expected to come up.

Those delays fall on the very products that the Trump administration has spent the past year working to clear for export. Nvidia's licenses to supply Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the 25% import-duty framework for H200 shipments to "approved" Chinese customers, and AMD's MI308 approvals all route through the Bureau of Industry and Security. Despite what seemed like good progress, Nvidia hasn’t sold a single H200 to China months after the White House cleared the deal, despite having received orders, and BIS processing delays now appear to be the reason why.

Middle East licensing is adding a further layer of difficulty. The export permissions that Cerebras and Nvidia received last year for shipments to the UAE and Saudi Arabia came with dollar-for-dollar U.S. investment matching requirements, meaning each case must be individually negotiated rather than stamped against a standardized template. But given that the BIS has lost a fifth of its licensing staff and is now handling a much more complex caseload, it’s easy to see why turnaround times ballooned to 76 days in the first half of 2025, well beyond the average 2023 turnaround time of 38 days.

Fiscal 2023 is the most recent year for which the Bureau of Industry and Security has published a formal annual report, and at that point, the agency was processing nearly 38,000 applications a year with an 85% approval rate. Its reports for 2024 and 2025 have yet to be released, leaving chipmakers reliant on anecdotal turnaround data to work out how long their own applications are likely to sit in the queue.

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