Chip giants Nvidia and AMD have agreed to pay the US government 15% of Chinese revenues as part of an “unprecedented” deal to secure export licences to China, the BBC has been told.

The US had previously banned the sale of powerful chips used in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) to China under export controls usually related to national security concerns.

Security experts, including some who served during President Donald Trump’s first term, recently wrote to the administration expressing “deep concern” that Nvidia’s H20 chip was “a potent accelerator” of China’s AI capabilities.

Trump on Monday dismissed security concerns, saying the chip in question was “old”.

Under the agreement, Nvidia will pay 15% of its revenues from H20 chip sales in China to the US government.

AMD will also give 15% of revenue generated from sales of its MI308 chip in China to the Trump administration, which was first reported by the Financial Times.

Nvidia told the BBC: “We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets.”

It added: “While we haven’t shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide.”

AMD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The deal sparked surprise and concern in the US, where critics said it raised security risks and questions about the Trump administration’s approach to dealing with private businesses.

“You either have a national security problem or you don’t,” said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation.

“If you have a 15% payment, it doesn’t somehow eliminate the national security issue,” she added.

On social media, some investors called the arrangement a “shakedown“, while others compared the requirement to a tax on exports – which has long been considered illegal in the US.

“Regardless of whether you think Nvidia should be able to sell H20s in China, charging a fee in exchange for relaxing national security export controls is a terrible precedent,” wrote Peter Harrell, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who formerly worked for the Biden administration.

“In addition to the policy problems with just charging Nvidia and AMD a 15% share of revenues to sell advanced chips in China, the US Constitution flatly forbids export taxes,” he added.

Democratic congressman Jake Auchincloss said: “Now the US government is financially motivated to sell AI to China? Makes me shudder to think what a TikTok deal might look like.”

The H20 chip was developed specifically for the Chinese market after US export restrictions were imposed by the Biden administration in 2023.

Sales of the chip were effectively banned by Trump’s government in April this year.

Beijing has previously criticised the US government, accusing it of “abusing export control measures, and engaging in unilateral bullying”.

Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang has spent months lobbying both sides for a resumption of sales of the chips in China. He reportedly met US President Donald Trump last week.

Charlie Dai, vice president and principal analyst at global research firm Forrester, said the agreement to hand over 15% of China chip sales to the US government in exchange for export licences was “unprecedented”.

“The arrangement underscores the high cost of market access amid escalating tech trade tensions, creating substantial financial pressure and strategic uncertainty for tech vendors,” he added.

In a letter last month to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a group of 20 security specialists said that while the biggest buyers of Nvidia’s H20 chips were civilian companies in China, they expect them to be used by the military.

They wrote: “Chips optimized for AI inference will not simply power consumer products or factory logistics; they will enable autonomous weapons systems, intelligence surveillance platforms and rapid advances in battlefield decision-making.”

In a statement to the BBC, Nvidia said: “America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America’s AI tech stack can be the world’s standard if we race.”

The Nvdia and AMD agreement comes as the boss of Intel, a rival chip maker, met with Trump at the White House on Monday after the president called for his immediate resignation due to his ties to China.

Intel said the pair had “a candid and constructive discussion on Intel’s commitment to strengthening U.S. technology and manufacturing leadership”.

Trump wrote on Truth Social the meeting was “a very interesting one”.

“Mr. Tan and my Cabinet members are going to spend time together, and bring suggestions to me during the next week,” Trump added.

Last week, Trump said on social media that Lip-Bu Tan was “highly conflicted”, apparently referring to his alleged investments in companies that the US said were tied to the Chinese military.

Mr Tan pushed back, stating it was “misinformation”.

Five more Palestinians, including a child, have died of malnutrition as a result of Israel’s punishing blockade of Gaza in the past 24 hour reporting period, the Health Ministry has said, as people in the enclave and many beyond its besieged borders mourned several journalists assassinated by Israel.

The ministry on Monday said most of these victims died in the past three weeks, as Israel-imposed starvation engulfs the entire population, with the total number of severe hunger deaths now at 222, including 101 children.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said “children in Gaza are dying from starvation and bombardments”.

“Entire families, neighbourhoods, and a generation are being wiped out,” the UN agency wrote in a post on social media. “Inaction and silence are complicity. It’s time for statements to turn into action and for an immediate ceasefire.”

At least 46 Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids across Gaza since dawn on Monday, including six aid seekers, medical sources have told Al Jazeera.

In one of the latest attacks, the al-Aqsa Hospital reported the killing of four Palestinians by Israeli forces in the south and east of Deir el-Balah, central Gaza.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said three civilians were killed and others were injured in an Israeli attack on the Zeitoun neighbourhood of southern Gaza City.

Meanwhile, on a daily basis, Israeli forces and US contractors are continuing to kill Palestinians desperately seeking aid at distribution points run by the controversial United States and Israeli-backed GHF.

Among those killed on Sunday was Ismail Qandil’s son. Speaking at the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Qandil told Al Jazeera that his son was unarmed and was looking for food when he was killed.

“He had no bullets, no weapon to shoot with. What did we do? What did we do for this to happen to us? Enough with the hunger and genocide,” he said.

“We are in a famine. We are being slaughtered. We can’t carry on. We send our sons to bring food, and they kill them. We are not members of the resistance, and we are not members of movements or anything. We are being destroyed.”

Israeli strikes kill Palestinian journalists

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,499 people and wounded 153,575 since October 7, 2023. The toll includes at least 270 journalists and media workers.

An outpouring of grief and condemnation followed the Israeli assassination of five Al Jazeera Arabic staff in Gaza, including prominent correspondent Anas al-Sharif, in a drone attack late on Sunday that hit a tent for journalists positioned outside the main gate of Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital.

The attack came days after the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, Irene Khan, warned of “unfounded accusations by the Israeli army” against al-Sharif after Israel repeatedly and falsely accused the 28-year-old reporter of being a Hamas affiliate.

Speaking on Monday, Khan said that Israel killed al-Sharif over his work as a journalist and that Israeli claims he was a Hamas member are totally unsubstantiated.

“If they had real evidence [of this], do you not think that they would put it out, up front, right away in the international arena? Of course they would. But why are they not doing that? Because they don’t have that evidence,” she told Al Jazeera.

“They simply [say] that any journalist who is reporting on Gaza must be a ‘Hamas member’, just as anyone who criticises Israel has to be ‘anti-Semitic’.

Meron Rapoport, a veteran Israeli journalist and editor of the Local Call news site, said the Israeli military’s accusation did not “make sense at all”. “The Israeli explanations are, at best, very lacking,” Rapoport told Al Jazeera from Tel Aviv.

He said Israel likely targeted al-Sharif now because of two main factors: first, his important role in “telling the world that there is famine in Gaza”, which “really hurt Israel internationally”; and, second, because of the planned upcoming seizure of Gaza City, which Israel wants to minimise coverage of.

“The less eyes and the less cameras and the less voices that will document this, what could be really a slaughter … is better for Israel,” Rapoport said.

Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Abu Azzoum, who reports for the network’s English channel, said the journalists were “working around the clock to unearth facts on the ground and keep the world informed about what has been going on in Gaza”.

“Now, we can see that the Israeli military is stepping up its attacks on journalists,” he said.

Speaking of his colleagues al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, Abu Azzoum said their deliberate killings were being seen in Gaza “as an attempt to silence two of the most courageous voices”.

US President Donald Trump has said he will try to get some territory back for Ukraine during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday.

“Russia’s occupied a big portion of Ukraine. They occupied prime territory. We’re going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine,” he told a news conference.

Trump said the talks in Alaska would be a “feel-out meeting” aimed at urging Putin to end the war, and that there would be “some swapping, changes in land”.

It is not the first time he has used the phrase “land-swapping”, though it is unclear what land Russia could cede to Ukraine. Kyiv has never lay claim to any Russian territories.

Trump said he will update European leaders if Putin proposes a “fair deal” during the talks, adding that he would speak to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky first “out of respect”.

“I’ll call him first… I’ll call him after, and I may say, ‘lots of luck, keep fighting,’ or I may say, ‘we can make a deal'”, he said.

Trump also said that while he and Zelensky “get along”, he “very severely disagrees with what he has done”. Trump has previously blamed Zelensky for the war in Ukraine, which was sparked by Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022.

The US president announced the meeting with Putin last Friday – the day of his self-imposed deadline for Russia to agree to a ceasefire or face more US sanctions.

In response to news of the Alaska summit, Zelensky said any agreements without input from Kyiv would amount to “dead decisions”.