On Monday, the chip giant announced it’s reapplying for licenses to resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China, after a whiplash-inducing few months shaped by U.S. export restrictions, a high-stakes political dinner, and some billion-dollar promises.
In a blog post, Nvidia said it expects to secure U.S. government approval soon and restart deliveries shortly after. Alongside the H20 news, Nvidia also introduced a new chip—the RTX Pro—designed specifically for the Chinese market. The company says it fully complies with current regulations and is geared toward applications in smart factories, logistics, and digital manufacturing.
The H20 chip—while not Nvidia’s most advanced—is the most powerful processor it can legally sell to China under current U.S. export controls. Tailored for “inference” tasks (essentially, running AI models in real-time rather than training them), the chip remains in high demand among Chinese tech players like Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance, which had been stockpiling them in anticipation of further crackdowns. A big draw? Its strong memory bandwidth and compatibility with Nvidia’s popular software stack, which streamlines deployment.
The backstory to all this is as political as it is technical. In April, the Trump administration blocked H20 chip sales, potentially jeopardizing $15–$16 billion in revenue. But that stance didn’t last long. After Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended a $1 million-per-plate Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course. Not long after, Nvidia pledged to build up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. over the next four years—a promise that appears to have helped shift policy.
Still, critics in Congress say the flip-flopping undermines America’s efforts to curb China’s AI development. Case in point: DeepSeek, a Chinese firm that used older Nvidia chips to create a surprisingly powerful AI model, despite previous restrictions.
As Huang continues his diplomatic rounds in Washington and Beijing, the situation reveals just how tricky it is for U.S. policymakers to balance national security concerns with economic incentives.
And if recent events are any indication, this probably won’t be the last time we see the U.S. change course on AI chip exports.
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