China state media says Nvidia H20 GPUs are unsafe and outdated, urges Chinese companies to avoid them — says chip is ‘neither environmentally friendly, nor advanced, nor safe'
A social media account linked to Chinese state media wrote an article on WeChat asserting that Nvidia's H20 chips are neither technologically advanced nor environmentally friendly. According to Reuters, the account, Yuyuan Tantian, is connected to China Central Television, which is a key organization in the country's state media (propaganda) apparatus.
'When a type of chip is neither environmentally friendly, nor advanced, nor safe, as consumers, we certainly have the option not to buy it,' Yuyuan Tantian said in the article (a translation, we assume).
The H20 chip is Nvidia's answer to Washington's ban on high-end AI GPU exports to China. Although its performance is only a fraction of what the top-of-the-line H200 can accomplish, it still sold surprisingly well, resulting in Nvidia posting a record revenue despite temporarily falling under export control between April and July 2025.
Aside from its reduced horsepower, Chinese authorities are also concerned with possible hidden geo-tracking and backdoors in the Green Team silicon. The U.S. Congress introduced a bill to enforce location tracking of high-end gaming and AI GPUs in mid-May, with the White House mulling doing the same earlier this month.
Because of this, China has raised concerns about the security of the H20 chips that Nvidia sells in the country, even going as far as summoning the AI chip giant to explain if it had any backdoor security risks. This isn't the only criticism of Nvidia in Chinese media in recent times. People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, said that Nvidia should convince the Chinese people that its chips do not have security risks. However, the company has firmly denied any such risk, emphasizing that its GPUs have no kill switches, no backdoors, and no spyware.
Although the headlining statement is not from a government source, China often uses state-linked social media accounts to shape its agenda and signal changes in its official stance without making a direct commitment. So, the criticism may be part of a broader campaign to steer domestic firms away from foreign AI hardware and toward homegrown alternatives like Huawei's Ascend chips.
Despite all these issues, many Chinese organizations and entities still purchase Nvidia products. Aside from the massive demand for H20 AI GPUs, there's also a burgeoning black market for banned AI chips. It's been estimated that a billion dollars' worth of these GPUs have been sold in the past quarter, with some companies already advertising the upcoming B300, which is expected to arrive later this year.
The WeChat post is likely the central government signaling its people to slowly move away from Nvidia's products and use alternative homegrown AI GPUs instead. However, the ecosystem that the company delivers makes its local competitors a much less compelling alternative.
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