Nvidia plans to resume selling its H20 AI accelerator to China as Washington has assured that such goods will be approved, which is in stark contrast to the earlier stance of the Trump administration.
Nvidia said in a blog post on Monday that US government officials have informed the company that they will approve the export license for the H20 chip. This AI chip designed by NVIDIA specifically for the Chinese market was developed to comply with earlier trade restrictions, but it has also been banned from sale in China since April. A spokesperson for the US Department of Commerce, which is responsible for regulating semiconductor export controls, has not yet responded to requests for comment.
After Nvidia announced the news, Nasdaq futures soared, and the stock markets in Hong Kong and China also responded positively. The Hang Seng Tech Index once rose by 2.2%, while the share prices of data center operators such as Beijing Guanghuan Xinwang Technology Co., Ltd. increased by 7.6%.
“Nvidia’s resumption of selling H20 to China is clearly a good thing,” said Vey-Sern Ling, managing director of United Private Bank. This is not only beneficial to NVIDIA Corporation, but also to the artificial intelligence semiconductor supply chain and Chinese technology platforms that are building artificial intelligence capabilities. This is also a positive development for China-Us relations.
Chief Executive Officer Huang Rengxun met with US President Donald Trump last week. This week, he will travel to Beijing to attend a large supply chain expo. Huang Rengxun told NVIDIA’s customers that he expected the new Chinese license to be approved and hoped to resume the delivery of H20 as soon as possible. Nvidia also plans to launch a brand-new chip focused on the Chinese market – RTX PRO. The company claims that it is “fully compliant”, meaning it is below the technical threshold that requires approval from Washington
The complete shift of the Trump administration’s H2O restriction policy was a huge victory for Huang Rengxun. Over the past few months, he has increasingly expressed his dissatisfaction with Washington’s chip restrictions openly. In May this year, he called these measures – covering the chips themselves and their manufacturing tools – “failures”, which contributed to the rise of Huawei Technologies Co., LTD. Recently, he said that the United States need not worry about the Chinese military using NVIDIA chips, because Beijing cannot rely on something that the United States may restrict at any time.
The H20 is an AI acceleration chip designed by NVIDIA specifically for the Chinese market, and its performance is slightly inferior to its gold standard. This is one of the measures taken by the company in response to the US restrictions on the sale of AI hardware to China. The United States first imposed restrictions on China in 2022 and has since upgraded them several times. Two consecutive generations of NVIDIA processors produced for the Chinese market – H800 and H20 – have been banned from sale. After Trump administration officials controlled the sales of H20 chips in April, Huang Rengxun said that NVIDIA would suffer losses of billions of dollars due to inventory overstock.
