NVIDIA H20 AI Chip Sales To China Set To Resume After Meeting With Trump

NVIDIA's stock price is climbing this morning, and it's no doubt the result of the chip designer confirming it has the White House's preliminary approval to resume selling H20 chips to China. Announced in a blog post, NVIDIA said it is in the process of filing government applications to once again export its H20 GPU to China after having met with U.S. President Donald Trump.

While shipments have not yet resumed, NVIDIA said the U.S. government has given it assurance that its licenses will be granted, and is hopeful that deliveries will begin "soon."

"General-purpose, open-source research and foundation models are the backbone of AI innovation," Huang explained to reporters in D.C. "We believe that every civil model should run best on the U.S. technology stack, encouraging nations worldwide to choose America."

This result appeared to be a foregone conclusion after Huang attended a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in early April, priced at $1 million per head. Whatever Huang told Trump and other government officials at the dinner, it worked in NVIDIA's favor. Following the dinner, the Trump administration pumped the brakes on placing additional export restrictions to NVIDIA's H20 chip shipments to China, which would have gone into effect that same month.

Then several weeks later (late May), Huang called the export controls, which were first implemented under the Biden administration, "a failure" while addressing the media at Computex.

"AI researchers are still doing AI research in China. If they don't have enough NVIDIA, they will use their own," Huang said at the time.

The concern from the White House is that shipping powerful AI chips to China poses a security threat. From NVIDIA's perspective, however, the export controls do more harm than good by stifling investments from significant lost sales. During the same press conference, Huang pointed out that export controls resulted in NVIDIA's market share in China dropping from 95% to 50%.

NVIDIA's H20 chip is a modified, cut-down version of the company's Hopper H100 silicon made specifically for China. In addition to the financial impact on NVIDIA, Huang argued that cutting off chip sales to China could result in lost jobs and lower tax payments to the U.S. government.

He also argued that the export restrictions serve to encourage China to design and build domestic AI chips faster, especially by Huawei.

NVIDIA's share price is up more than 4% in early morning trading following the announcement.