Nvidia to resume H20 AI chip sales to China in US reversal

Business Times

2 days ago

[HONG KONG] Nvidia plans to resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chip to China after securing Washington's assurances that such shipments would get approved, a dramatic reversal from the Trump administration's earlier stance.
US government officials told Nvidia they would green-light export licenses for the H20 AI accelerator, the company said in a blog post. That China-specific variant was created to comply with earlier trade curbs, but has since April also been blocked from sale in the country without a US permit.
Billionaire co-founder Jensen Huang appeared on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV shortly after Nvidia announced the decision, saying the company had secured approval to begin shipping.
The US move comes after weeks of thawing relations between Washington and Beijing, guided by an opaque truce that's designed to see both sides approve exports of crucial technologies.
The US wants China to allow more sales of essential rare-earth minerals, and in exchange is lifting a spate of recent export controls that were imposed in the lead-up to last month's trade talks in London. Throughout those talks, US President Donald Trump's team insisted that controls on Nvidia's H20 chips were not up for discussion.
It marks a massive win for Huang, who has branded Washington's chip curbs a 'failure' that fuelled the rise of Huawei Technologies. And it's a boon to Chinese companies from DeepSeek to Alibaba Group Holding that need Nvidia chips to train, expand and host the AI services they are building to compete with the likes of OpenAI.
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Nasdaq futures surged after Nvidia's announcement, with Hong Kong and Chinese stocks also reacting positively. The Hang Seng Tech Index rose as much as 2.2 per cent, while data centre operators such as Beijing Sinnet Technology jumped as much as 8.4 per cent. A spokesperson for the US Commerce Department, which oversees semiconductor export controls, did not respond to a request for comment.
'Nvidia resuming the sale of H20 to China is obviously positive,' said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at Union Bancaire Privee. 'Not just for the company but also the AI semiconductor supply chain, as well as China tech platforms that are building AI capabilities. This is also a good development for US-China relations.'
Huang met with Trump last week and is in Beijing this week to attend a large supply chain expo. He said Nvidia also plans to debut a new China-focused product, the RTX PRO, which the company described as 'fully compliant', meaning that it falls below the technical thresholds that would necessitate Washington's approval in the first place. He has said the US does not need to worry about the Chinese military using Nvidia chips, since it cannot rely on something the US could restrict at any point.
The H20 is a less powerful version of Nvidia's gold-standard AI acceleration semiconductors, designed specifically for China. It's part of the company's response to US restrictions on AI hardware sales to China, which were first imposed in 2022 and ratcheted up several times since, capturing two successive generations of processors Nvidia made for the China market, the H800, followed by the H20.
After Trump officials controlled the sale of H20 chips in April, Huang said Nvidia would suffer a cost of billions of US dollars due to unsold inventory.
Huang is seeking discussions with Chinese leaders, including the commerce minister this week, with Nvidia's central role in the global AI rollout likely on the agenda. It made history last week as the first company to hit US$4 trillion of market value, a testament to its central role in providing the hardware for a post-ChatGPT AI infrastructure building boom. BLOOMBERG