Trump Approves NVIDIA H200 Exports to China!
On Monday, December 8 local time, U.S. President Donald Trump announced that artificial intelligence chip giant NVIDIA will be permitted to ship its H200 AI chips to “approved customers” in China and other regions, provided the U.S. government receives a 25% share of NVIDIA's H200 sales revenue in those areas.
Trump posted on Truth Social that China had responded “positively” to the proposal. He wrote that this policy “will support American jobs, strengthen U.S. manufacturing, and benefit American taxpayers.” “The Commerce Department is finalizing the details, and the same approach will apply to AMD and Intel,” he added in the post. “And other great American companies.”
In August, Nvidia agreed to remit 15% of its H20 chip sales revenue in China to the U.S. government in exchange for approval to resume exports of its China-specific H20 chips.
But almost simultaneously, Chinese state media warned that the H20 chips might pose security risks and that their performance had become outdated.
Subsequently, NVIDIA's H20 faced significant sales challenges in China. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged that the company's market share in China's AI chip sector had dropped to zero. Huang further projected that the next quarter would remain at zero, and the following quarter would also be zero.
In response, Huang has been pushing for the export of its H200 chip and even the more advanced Blackwell GPU to China. He expressed hope for a breakthrough between the U.S. and Chinese governments, aiming to collaborate with both administrations to re-enter China's massive market.
According to Huang's projections, “China's AI chip market is valued at approximately $50 billion and could grow to $200 billion by the end of this decade.”
“It's truly unfortunate that U.S. companies cannot participate in this. This represents a critically important revenue stream,” Huang remarked. “With this revenue, we could significantly increase and accelerate our investments. Therefore, I hope we have the opportunity to re-enter the Chinese market. For now, however, we must assume zero revenue.”
However, while Trump opposed exports of Nvidia's advanced Blackwell GPU to China, he is considering allowing exports of the H200—which shares the same architecture as the H20 but offers superior performance.
Regarding Trump's approval of H200 exports to China, a Nvidia spokesperson stated in a release: “We appreciate President Trump's decision to allow the U.S. chip industry to compete, supporting high-paying American jobs and manufacturing.”
The spokesperson added: “Supplying H200 to commercial customers approved by the Department of Commerce represents a carefully considered balance that benefits the United States.”
According to records, previously approved exports of H20 chips and H200 to China were both based on the previous-generation Hopper architecture. However, the H20 is a stripped-down version of the H100. The H200 features 141GB of HBM3e memory with a bandwidth of up to 48TB/s, representing a significant performance boost over the previous-generation H100. Estimates suggest the H200's performance will be twice that of the H20 chip.
However, due to existing export control restrictions on performance and bandwidth parameters, even if the U.S. government approves H200 exports to China, NVIDIA will need to implement certain “castrations” on the H200. It is anticipated that both the number of cores and bandwidth will require further reduction. Nevertheless, its overall performance is expected to deliver a substantial improvement over the original H20 (which only featured 96GB of HBM3 memory).