Arm Holdings Plc chief executive officer Rene Haas said June 12 that U.S. export controls on China threaten to slow overall technological advances and are ultimately bad for consumers and companies, aligning himself with Nvidia Corp. chief executive officer Jensen Huang and others looking to ease tensions between Washington and Beijing. 

“If you narrow access to technology and you force other ecosystems to grow up, it’s not good,” Haas said June 12 in an interview with Bloomberg at the Founders Forum Global conference in Oxford, U.K. “It makes the pie smaller, if you will. And frankly, it’s not very good for consumers.” He also noted that Arm’s footprint in China is “quite significant.”

Semiconductor companies such as Arm and Nvidia Corp. are increasingly warning that export bans will compel China to develop its own industry and could ultimately backfire on the U.S. Washington has imposed limits on exports of the most sophisticated chips and chip-making equipment to China in recent years in an efforts to stall Beijing ambitions to advance in everything from artificial intelligence to quantum computing.

In April, the Trump administration placed new curbs on exports of data center processors to Chinese customers, effectively shutting Nvidia out of the market. The restrictions will cost Nvidia about $8 billion in Chinese revenue during its second fiscal quarter, the company said last month.

In late April, Nvidia’s Huang made his strongest comments yet against U.S. export controls, saying the restrictions are holding American businesses back from better capitalizing on opportunities. He warned in an interview with Bloomberg Television last month that Chinese AI rivals are filling the void left by the departure of U.S. companies from that market, and their technology is becoming more powerful. 

“The Chinese competitors have evolved,” he said in the interview. Huawei Technologies Co., a Chinese tech company blacklisted by the U.S. government, has become “quite formidable,” he said.

There are some signs that trade tensions will ease. Washington and Beijing ended the latest round of trade negotiations this week, with Donald Trump declaring a deal was “DONE” to restore the flow of critical metals from China. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that some tech curbs would be unwound in return. 

Arm has a long history with Nvidia — and was at one point an acquisition target until regulatory hurdles caused the deal to collapse. Its central processing units are paired with Nvidia’s graphics processing units to boost computing speed for artificial-intelligence workloads, including Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell platform. 

Haas said his personal lobbying efforts have increased as tensions between the U.S. and China grew. 

“I’ve spent far more time in Washington in the last year and a half than I have in my entire career,” Haas said. “The current administration has a lot of smart people who are connected to our industry, and I think we’re looking to make our voice heard.”

Haas meanwhile described Huang as a “very fierce competitor” who innovates “very, very quickly.” But he said he “likes Arm’s chances” of competing, as its products and services span more markets. Arm is “the only company that can address AI — whether it’s training and inference in the data center or inference and running something in as small as earbuds. That’s a difficult place for Nvidia.”