- President Trump’s push to expand global AI chip sales is being undermined by licensing backlogs and staff attrition at the Bureau of Industry and Security, Bloomberg reported April 10, 2026.
- The BIS, the Commerce Department agency that approves AI chip exports, lacks both the personnel and clear policy direction to process a growing volume of license applications.
- The bottleneck affects shipments of advanced semiconductors—including Nvidia’s H100 and H20 GPUs—to most international markets outside a small group of close US allies.
- US chipmakers, overseas cloud operators, and international AI firms face extended and uncertain approval timelines under the current system.
What Happened
President Donald Trump’s stated goal of significantly expanding global sales of American AI chips risks being undercut by administrative dysfunction at the federal agency responsible for approving those sales, Bloomberg reported on April 10, 2026. According to Bloomberg’s reporting, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS)—the Commerce Department division that issues export licenses for advanced semiconductors—is contending with a growing licensing backlog, staff departures that have reduced its review capacity, and an absence of clear policy direction from department leadership on how to apply Trump’s export liberalization goals to day-to-day licensing decisions.
BIS is the sole federal authority empowered to approve or deny export license applications for covered AI chips. Without a BIS license, shipments of advanced GPUs to most countries outside a small tier of US allies cannot legally proceed.
Why It Matters
BIS administers the export control architecture established under President Biden’s AI diffusion rule, finalized on January 13, 2025, in the final days of the Biden administration. That framework divided export destinations into three tiers: Tier 1 nations (close allies including NATO members, Japan, South Korea, and Australia) face minimal restrictions; Tier 2 countries (most of the rest of the world) require individual export licenses for shipments of covered chips above certain thresholds; and Tier 3 countries (including China and Russia) face near-total restrictions.
Trump’s team inherited that framework while publicly signaling intent to ease restrictions for commercial partners and US-aligned countries, framing expanded chip exports as a US economic priority. The BIS dysfunction Bloomberg identified means those signals have not translated into faster processing on the ground.
Technical Details
The chips most directly affected are Nvidia’s high-end data center GPUs—specifically the H100, H200, and H20 series—which remain the primary hardware for large-scale AI training and inference. Each export license application requires BIS analysts to assess the end-user, intended use, and destination against a set of national security criteria before approval. Bloomberg’s reporting identified three compounding failures in that process: an accumulating backlog of pending applications, staff attrition reducing the agency’s throughput, and a policy vacuum in which BIS officials lack updated guidance reflecting the new administration’s priorities.
The volume pressure on BIS has grown alongside global AI infrastructure buildout. Data center operators in Tier 2 markets—including India, the Gulf states, and Southeast Asia—have significantly increased their procurement of advanced AI hardware since 2024, generating a corresponding surge in license application volume that the agency’s current staffing level was not designed to absorb.
Who’s Affected
Nvidia, which derives a substantial and growing share of its data center revenue from international markets, faces the most direct commercial exposure. In its fiscal year ending January 2025, the company disclosed that export restrictions materially constrained revenues from controlled markets. The licensing backlog extends that constraint into markets where policy had been expected to loosen under Trump.
International cloud operators and AI companies in Tier 2 countries seeking to procure GPU clusters face uncertain and extended timelines. US-based hyperscalers—including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon—that procure hardware on behalf of overseas cloud customers are also caught in the delay. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department is the responsible party for resolving both the staffing shortfall and the policy direction gap Bloomberg identified.
What’s Next
As of April 11, 2026, the Trump administration has not announced a formal revision or replacement for Biden’s AI diffusion rule. BIS continues to adjudicate applications under the existing policy framework without updated guidance reflecting the administration’s stated export goals. Bloomberg’s reporting indicates that without additional personnel or a concrete policy directive from Commerce Department leadership, the backlog is likely to persist even if revised export rules are eventually promulgated. The gap between the administration’s chip export rhetoric and BIS’s operational capacity remains unresolved.
