The US government has just dealt a major blow to NVIDIA: it will no longer be able to sell its most successful AI chip in China.

In the current climate, this GPU is very important for the company led by Jensen Huang. In fact, its engineers designed it to have an AI chip that they could deliver to their Chinese customers when US sanctions banned NVIDIA from selling the A800 and H800 GPUs, as well as graphics cards with the GeForce RTX 4090 chip, in the country led by Xi Jinping. Previously, the Department of Commerce had also radically restricted the sale in China of the A100 and H100 GPUs, NVIDIA’s most advanced at the time.

NVIDIA’s success in China is doomed
The H20 GPU has been very well received by NVIDIA’s Chinese customers, despite the fact that this chip’s capabilities are clearly inferior to those of the company’s other AI offerings. In fact, the Department of Commerce initially allowed its sale in China because this integrated circuit complied with the restrictions it had imposed. And despite its limitations, its sales in China have grown 50% quarter over quarter since it entered this market in mid-2024.

Despite everything, this boom time for NVIDIA in China is about to end. The leaks have finally come true: the US Department of Commerce has imposed restrictions on the export of the H20 GPU to China, which effectively means that this chip will presumably no longer reach NVIDIA’s Chinese customers. During the dinner I mentioned in the opening lines of this article, Jensen Huang allegedly pledged to Donald Trump to invest more money in AI data centers within the US.