Nvidia has announced the US government will allow it to resume sales of its GPUs to Chinese customers.
The US prohibits exports of advanced semiconductors to China, on grounds that the Middle Kingdom uses them to advance its military capabilities and conduct surveillance operations.
Nvidia tried to evade those bans by creating the H20 GPU, an underpowered accelerator that US authorities were happy to see sold into China. Washington later reversed course and stopped issuing export permits for the H20. That decision cost Nvidia around $10 billion in sales.
After the H20 ban, CEO Jensen Huang labelled US trade policy “precisely wrong” and “a failure” because he feels the world can benefit from innovations developed in China, and that the USA benefits if the world’s top AI researchers rely on tech from Nvidia – an American company.
Huang has made the same points repeatedly for months and on Monday Nvidia announced “NVIDIA is filing applications to sell the NVIDIA H20 GPU again” and “The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon.”
The CEO also announced “a new, fully compliant NVIDIA RTX PRO GPU that ‘is ideal for digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics’.”
Nvidia didn’t detail specs of the new GPU, but May rumors suggested the US might allow exports of its RTX Pro 6000-series server chips, which boast up to 4 petaFLOPs of sparse performance at 4-bit floating point precision, pack 96GB of GDDR7, and deliver 1.6TB/s of memory bandwidth. The company recommends the RTX Pro range for use in technical and visual computing applications, or as a tool to fine-tune LLMs or run local AI assistants.
Jensen Huang has campaigned hard for US government permission to resume sales to China, even attending a million-bucks-a-plate meal at US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Those efforts appear to have paid off.
Nvidia made its announcement well and truly after US stock markets closed for the day, and the company’s stock hasn’t moved markedly in after-hours trading. The Register has not been able to find supporting statements from the White House or Department of Commerce, but as the resumption of sales to China will represent a material event for Nvidia, the GPU-maker would not have announced the news without being certain of the situation. ®
Bootnote
This news may not go down well in Taiwan, where The Reg spotted the sticker during to our May visit to the Computex exhibition and conference.
Sticker protesting Nvidia’s sales to China spotted at Computext 2025 – Click to enlarge