Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) late on Monday said the technology giant has won approval from US President Donald Trump’s administration to sell its advanced H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) used to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to China.
The news came in a company blog post late on Monday and Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run China Global Television Network in remarks shown on X.
“The US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said.
Photo: Xinhua news agency via AP
“Today, I’m announcing that the US government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,” Huang told reporters in Beijing.
He said that half of the world’s AI researchers are in China.
“It’s so innovative and dynamic here in China that it’s really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market here in China,” he said.
Huang recently met with Trump and other US policymakers and this week is in Beijing to attend a supply chain conference and speak with Chinese officials.
Huang’s visit is being closely watched in Beijing and Washington, where a bipartisan pair of senators last week sent the CEO a letter asking him to abstain from meeting companies working with military or intelligence bodies.
Nvidia has profited enormously from the rapid adoption of AI, becoming the first company to have its market value surpass US$4 trillion last week. However, the trade rivalry between the US and China has been weighing heavily on the industry.
Washington has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology to China for years, citing concerns that know-how meant for civilian use could be deployed for military purposes.
The White House in April announced that it would restrict sales of Nvidia’s H20 GPUs and Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s MI308 chips to China, following the emergence of China’s DeepSeek (深度求索) AI chatbot in January.
Nvidia had said the tighter export controls would cost the company an extra US$5.5 billion, and Huang and other technology leaders have been lobbying Trump to reverse the restrictions. They said that such limits hinder US competition in a leading edge sector in one of the world’s largest markets for technology.
They have also warned that US export controls could end up pushing other countries toward China’s AI technology.
As Nvidia said it planned to resume sales of H20s to China, Chinese companies have scrambled to place orders for the GPUs, which Nvidia would then need to send to the US government for approval, the sources familiar with the matter said.
They added that Internet giants ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊) are in the process of submitting applications.
Central to the process is a “whitelist” put together by Nvidia for Chinese companies to register for potential purchases, one of the sources said.
Separately, Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) said yesterday that it plans to restart shipments of its MI308 chips to China after the US said it would approve the sales.
The US commerce department told AMD that license applications for the MI308 products would move forward for review, an AMD spokesman said.
AMD said in April that export restrictions on the MI308 chips would cost the company about US$800 million.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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