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Nvidia to resume shipping H20 graphic processing chips to China in boon for nation’s AI

Nvidia has applied to sell the H20 GPU again, and the US government has ‘assured Nvidia that licences will be granted’

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Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, during a news conference in Taipei on May 21, 2025. Photo: AFP/Getty Images/TNS
Nvidia said it would sell a made-for-China computer chip to customers in the country, while its founder and CEO Jensen Huang is in Beijing for his third visit this year to the world’s second-largest economy amid a deepening and widening rivalry with the US.

The US government has “assured Nvidia that licences will be granted” for exporting the H20 chip, a made-for-China product that was less powerful than Nvidia’s gold-standard acceleration chip, according to a Tuesday statement by the California-based chip designer.

Nvidia also planned to release a “new, fully compliant” RTX PRO graphics processing unit (GPU) for China that was “ideal for digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics,” the company said.

The resumption of sales was a boon for Nvidia as the world’s first US$4 trillion company gained access to one of the largest investors in artificial intelligence (AI), where funding could grow 48 per cent this year to US$98 billion, according to a forecast by Bank of America. It is also a breakthrough for China’s developers of large language models and other AI uses as they get their hands on some of the most advanced chips for high-powered computing.
Image of Nvidia H20 GPU. Photo: Handout
Image of Nvidia H20 GPU. Photo: Handout

Huang, who is expected to attend the International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing tomorrow, met “government and industry officials to discuss how AI will raise productivity and expand opportunity,” the company said. The expo, a major conference held by the Chinese government, was previously attended by US executives including Apple’s Tim Cook.

Huang is scheduled to speak in Mandarin tomorrow morning at the Expo, according to a video clip published by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), the expo’s organiser.

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