NVIDIA has gotten the go-ahead from the US’ Trump administration to continue selling its H20 AI Chips in China. Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, said that his company had given Washington assurances and that such shipments will obtain approval, moving forward.
The approval marks a significant, if not dramatic, reversal of the Trump’s administration’s earlier actions on the matter. Back in April, the government further tightened trade restrictions it had on China, in order to block the sales of H20 AI Chips to any Asian country without a US permit.
As per its blog: “In the U.S. capital, Huang met with President Trump and U.S. policymakers, reaffirming 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.”
“In Beijing, Huang met with government and industry officials to discuss how AI will raise productivity and expand opportunity. The discussions underscored how researchers worldwide can advance safe and secure AI for the benefit of all.”
The H20 AI Chip is essentially a watered-down version of NVIDIA’s more powerful H100 GPU, the latter being built using the company’s latest Hopper architecture. The H20 was built to the specifications of the US government, with limited AI inference capabilities.
Ultimately, the resumption of the H20 AI Chips to China marks a significant victory for Huang, who has been vocal about ongoing trade restrictions for AI chips. He branded it a failure that led to NVIDIA losing a huge portion of its market share for AI chips to companies such as Huawei Technologies. With Washington’s approval, he’s certainly hoping that companies such as the Alibaba Group will seek out Team Green’s hardware to train and operate their AI services in the future.
