Entrepreneur and Shark Tank personality Kevin O'Leary thinks Washington is getting the chip war all wrong. Instead of restricting AI chip exports, he says the US should be flooding global markets with American semiconductors to lock in long-term technological dominance.

The Case Against Chip Export Restrictions

O'Leary shared his contrarian take on X this week, targeting current restrictions on chips from Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). His thesis? These limits don't actually hurt China—they just accelerate their race to build homegrown alternatives.

"Restricting Nvidia and AMD chips doesn't hurt China; it just pushes them to build their own stack. That's a strategic mistake," O'Leary said.

Sell Everything, Then Recruit the Winners

His strategy is straightforward: saturate the market with American chips, get everyone building on US technology, then poach the best talent that emerges. "The whole idea in order to win AI data supremacy is to sell everybody everything and then force them, because of the technology, to develop their stacks on American chips. All of them. That's how you win," he explained in a video.

He drew parallels to post-World War II America, when the US recruited German rocket scientists who had developed their expertise on one technology system and brought that knowledge stateside. "Those rocket scientists… moved from Germany to the United States because they wanted to move their families there," O'Leary noted. "And all of a sudden, that resource was built on American hardware, American ingenuity."

The logic is simple: create global dependency on US chips, watch for the innovators who emerge, then offer them something China can't—a better place to live and work. "Give everybody everything and identify the winners. Because you have a better place to live, you move them into the United States. That's how you win the technology war," he said.

Nvidia Caught in the Crossfire

Meanwhile, Nvidia is getting squeezed from both directions. CEO Jensen Huang recently described the company's China situation as going "from 95% market share to 0%." Beijing essentially shut the door through a combination of bans on foreign AI chips in government projects, tighter customs inspections, and a massive domestic production push that created oversupply.

Last month, major US cloud providers Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) and Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) backed the Gain AI Act, which would tighten chip export restrictions even further—a rare instance of these companies breaking with Nvidia, which called the policy "self-defeating."

The Trump administration piled on by blocking Nvidia's deliberately scaled-down B30A chip, arguing it still had enough capability to train large language models. In September, White House adviser David Sacks warned that overly restrictive policies might actually strengthen Chinese competitors like Huawei, which is already developing rival AI chips and reducing dependence on American hardware.

O'Leary's argument is that the current approach is creating exactly what it's trying to prevent: a strong, self-sufficient Chinese semiconductor ecosystem completely independent of US influence.