News broke earlier this week that Nvidia was filing applications to sell its H20 AI GPUs in China once more, and that the US government had assured it that a license to sell the high-powered hardware would be granted. Now we're learning a little more about how this arrangement might work, and it turns out it's part of a new US/China trade deal on the import and export of rare earths.
Or, to quote US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick speaking to Reuters, "We put that in the trade deal with the magnets." While the agreement does appear to include the specific lifting of an export ban on magnets, it's the rare earth metals that are almost certainly the bigger prize on the table here.
