Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang said the company is spinning up manufacturing of the H200 artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators for customers in China, a sign of progress in the chipmaker’s effort to re-enter the market.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Huang said Nvidia had been licensed for “many customers in China” for H200 sales and is in the process of “restarting our manufacturing.”
That outlook is different than it was a couple of weeks ago, he said.
Photo: Bloomberg
“Our supply chain is getting fired up,” Huang said during the event, part of the company’s annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The company unveiled a flurry of new products at the expo on Monday and gave investors a financial update on Tuesday morning.
Nvidia has been working to reestablish sales of its AI processors in China, a market that was virtually closed to such products by US export restrictions. US President Donald Trump’s administration has begun allowing Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc to sell less-powerful versions of their chips in the country, but licenses from the US government are required.
Though the H200 is less advanced than Nvidia’s current AI accelerators — used to train and run AI models — it is still more powerful than what is available locally in China. Nvidia’s top-of-the-range chips, the Blackwell and forthcoming Vera Rubin series, remain banned for sale in China.
Nvidia got Trump’s nod to sell H200s to Chinese customers in December last year, but the company has yet to tally any revenue from such sales. Rulemakers in Washington have also imposed hurdles that slowed formal approvals and make a return to unfettered sales unlikely.
H200 shipments to China are subject to a US inspection and a 25 percent duty. Officials are also considering capping H200 sales to 75,000 chips per Chinese customer, with total shipments reaching up to 1 million processors.
Nvidia is also preparing a version of Groq Inc’s AI chip that can be sold to the Chinese market, which was reported earlier on Tuesday, citing two sources familiar with the matter.
The company plans to tap Groq chips for inference, where AI systems answer questions, write code or carry out tasks for users.
While Nvidia dominates the market for training AI systems, it faces much more competition in the inference market. Several major Chinese firms, including AI heavyweights such as Baidu Inc (百度), already produce their own inference chips.
The chips being readied for China are not downgraded versions or made specifically for the Chinese market, one of the sources said. However, the new variant can be adapted to work with other systems, the source said, adding that the Groq chip is expected to be available in May.
Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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