In the latest blow to Nvidia's attempts to sell its H20 GPUs to Chinese firms, the US Commerce Department stands accused of delaying the approval of key export licenses that are required before shipments can start. According to officials contacted by Reuters, this is the worst backlog of license applications in over three decades, leaving billions of dollars worth of GPUs and other products in limbo.
A key component of the second Trump administration, since its inception, has been instability in global trade. On-again, off-again tariffs and soured trade relations between long-time allies have been all too common, but few trading relationships have been as tumultuous as that between the U.S. and China. Terse negotiations have been ongoing for months, and at the heart of it all lies Chinese access to AI training and inference hardware, namely, Nvidia GPUs.
