Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, managed to dodge a bullet with the crackdown on his company’s H20 chips recently, after he took a dinner with US President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence. And yes, it is presumed that he paid the US$1 million (~RM4.44 million) entry fee.
Almost immediately after the dinner, the Trump administration reportedly suspended its crackdown on NVIDIA’s H20 chips, allowing the GPU brand to continue legally selling them to China. The current 154% tariffs on the country notwithstanding, the Asian powerhouse remains one of the company’s most important markets, with DeepSeek being one of its major client in the AI sphere.
The Trump administration was prepared to impose sanctions and restrictions on NVIDIA and its H20 chip as early as this week, so you can see how this is a major breakthrough for both the Green team and China as well. Granted, the chips are modified to have lesser performance than the full-fat H20 but at the end of the day, it’s still advanced chips flowing into a country that is undoubtedly at the forefront of the craze.
NVIDIA’s H20 chip is coveted by several AI companies, in part for its ability to support inference, which is the process that allows AI models to take the collective knowledge it has learned and use it to generate or predict new outcomes and data.
