Following a week where CEO Jensen Huang met with Donald Trump in Washington, Nvidia says the administration will allow it to ship GPUs to China.
It looks like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s charm offensive in Washington has paid off as the giant chip maker says the US administration has assured him licences will be granted to again export the Nvidia H20 GPU to China.
Huang announced a new, fully compliant Nvidia RTX PRO GPU that “is ideal for digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics”.
On its news blog yesterday, Nvida said Huang had met with president Trump and US policymakers, and reaffirmed Nvidia’s support for the administration’s “effort to create jobs, strengthen domestic AI infrastructure and onshore manufacturing, and ensure that America leads in AI worldwide”. Huang seems to have appealed to the administration’s wish to be the global leader in AI chips production.
“General-purpose, open-source research and foundation models are the backbone of AI innovation,” Huang told reporters. “We believe that every civil model should run best on the US technology stack, encouraging nations worldwide to choose America.”
Last week (July 9), Nvidia became the first company in history to briefly hit a $4trn valuation, beating Microsoft and Apple to the milestone.
It has been a meteoric rise. The Silicon Valley-based chips giant hit a valuation of $1trn back in June 2023, but today it has become the undisputed leader in the infrastructure behind the AI boom.
Nvidia had reported a strong first quarter back in May, with revenue up 69pc year on year, but it warned that it could lose out on $8bn in revenue from US restrictions to chip exports during Q2.
In April, Nvidia was informed by the US government that it required an export licence to sell its previously approved H20 processors to China. This cost the company $4.5bn, Nvidia said.
CEO Huang said on the May earnings call with investors that the Chinese market for AI chips, worth $50bn, was “effectively closed to US industry”. If the US administration is genuinely ready to reverse that stance, it could be a very good year for Nvidia indeed.
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