The commerce secretary has been writing new rules that would affect Southeast Asian data centers, some of which are clients of his former firm.
In Malaysia’s lush southern peninsula, a data center known as A201 is set to open next year, packed with hundreds of millions of dollars in Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence servers.
The data center plans to supply this computing power to a Chinese tech giant. The setup is legal and profitable. It will also sidestep U.S. rules that ban sales of the most advanced A.I. chips directly to Chinese firms.
The company operating the data center is a client of Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm formerly led by Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, who handed off leadership of it to his sons. Mr. Lutnick is now writing the rules that would have a substantial effect on the data center’s business.
Mr. Lutnick has been seen as a force slowing rules that would clamp down on the sale of Nvidia chips to data centers like A201, which sit outside China but provide A.I. computing power to Chinese firms.
The Trump administration, concerned about ceding the country’s advantage in A.I., bans the sale of cutting-edge chips to China. But it has been embroiled in an internal debate for much of the past two years over how far to go in limiting chip sales to data centers in Southeast Asia. On one side of the debate are China hawks, who see the data centers as a way for Beijing to do an end run around the chip sales ban. On the other are officials, most prominently Mr. Lutnick, who are pushing against going too far in limiting the ability of U.S. companies like Nvidia to sell their products in Asia.
Recently, Mr. Lutnick has been advocating a less stringent version of those controls under consideration, which could cut back on Nvidia’s business by giving the U.S. government more oversight of chip sales to international data centers. It is the latest example of Mr. Lutnick’s soft touch on chip regulation, which has prompted criticism from lawmakers and others in the administration.
