The White House plans to allow Nvidia to sell its H20 AI GPUs to China once again, signaling a significant victory for the company after it suffered a $5.5-billion write-off when they were banned for export to China in mid-April. The company confirmed to Tom’s Hardware that “The U.S. government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon.”
The company announced the China-specific H20 AI GPUs in late 2023 after Washington banned its most advanced H100 and H200 models for export to China. However, the Biden Administration’s AI diffusion rule, and then more targeted measures from the Trump administration, threatened to ban even these defanged GPUs, which were still quite popular among Chinese customers. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly spent $1 million on a dinner with the president to have the plan suspended, but the White House banned their export a week later anyway, a measure affecting both the Nvidia H20 and AMD MI308 AI chips.
