The US government has permitted Nvidia to resume sales of its H20 AI chip in China. This reversal could generate billions in revenue after the company previously wrote off orders due to export restrictions imposed by the Trump administration.
US government officials have agreed to approve export licenses for the H20 artificial intelligence accelerator, the chip manufacturer announced on Monday. This decision marks a dramatic reversal of the Trump administration’s previous position, which in April had imposed stricter measures to block H20 sales to Beijing.
Chinese response
“Let me stress that China opposes politicizing and weaponizing trade and tech issues,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said at a regular briefing when asked about Nvidia. Export restrictions “will destabilize global industrial supply chains and will serve nobody’s interest.”
H20 shipments would also be a boon for companies from DeepSeek to Alibaba that, despite Huawei’s advances in semiconductors, are seeking Nvidia hardware to train, expand, and operate the AI services they are building to compete with companies such as OpenAI.
Years of restrictions
The US first restricted Nvidia’s China sales in 2022 with sweeping measures to prevent the Asian country from accessing advanced AI that could benefit the Chinese military. Nvidia has since designed new processors for the Chinese market several times to comply with those measures.
Within months of the initial restrictions, the chipmaker introduced the H800, which President Joe Biden effectively banned from sale to China in 2023. Nvidia responded with the H20, for which Biden officials considered export restrictions but ultimately did not implement. After Trump moved forward with H20 controls in April, Nvidia designed yet another China-focused product: the RTX PRO.
The company described that chip as “fully compliant,” meaning it falls below the technical thresholds that would require Washington’s approval for export to the world’s second-largest economy.