Nvidia Resumes AI Chip Sales to China After U.S. Approval

After months of export ban, Nvidia can again deliver AI chips to China. The US government has given the green light for the sale of the H20 graphics processor. In addition, the chip manufacturer announces a new RTX Pro GPU.

Breakthrough in the trade dispute

After intensive negotiations with the US government, Nvidia can resume business in China, according to the news agency Reuters. The chip giant has submitted an application to resume the sale of its H20 GPUs in China and is said to have already received the assurance of the US authorities that the necessary permits are given promptly.

The H20 GPU was originally developed as a slimmed-down version of the powerful H100 card to meet US export restrictions. The chip offers reduced computing power for AI applications, but still remains attractive for many commercial applications. The H20 reaches about 296 teraflops at 16 bit floating point precision (German lubricant) and has 96 gigabytes of HBM3 memory.

Billion business possible again

The importance of this decision for Nvidia is enormous. The ban on sales for the H20 chip imposed in April had forced the company to write off $ 5.5 billion. In a podcast, CEO Jensen Huang also revealed that Nvidia had to do without sales worth $ 15 billion.

China is considered one of the most important growth markets for AI hardware. Before the export restrictions, the China business made around 20 to 25 percent of Nvidia’s total sales. Chinese technology companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are important buyers for data centers and AI infrastructure.

New chip generation for China

In addition to the resumption of the H20 sale, Nvidia announced a new AI chip especially for the Chinese market-the RTX Pro GPU. The processor was developed in such a way that it is completely compliant with the US export controls and is particularly suitable for AI applications in intelligent factories and logistics systems.

According to the first rumors, the new chip could be a variant of the RTX Pro 6000D series. These processors are said to offer up to four peta flops computing power for 4-bit sliding accuracy, have over 96 gigabytes of GDDR7 memory and reach a storage bandwidth of 1.6 TB/s.

Background of the export restrictions

The US export controls for semiconductors were introduced in October 2022 and tightened several times. The aim is to limit China’s access to advanced AI technology that could be used for military purposes. The restrictions affect not only Nvidia, but also other US chip manufacturers such as AMD and Intel.

The regulations define specific performance limits for chips that may be exported to China. Processors that exceed these thresholds require a special export license. Nvidia therefore had to replace its A800 and H800 chips originally planned for China with the weaker H20 models.