NVIDIA’s stock price is climbing this morning, and it’s no doubt the result of the chip designer confirming it has the White House’s preliminary approval to resume selling H20 chips to China. Announced in a blog post, NVIDIA said it is in the process of filing government applications to once again export its H20 GPU to China after having met with U.S. President Donald Trump.
While shipments have not yet resumed, NVIDIA said the U.S. government has given it assurance that its licenses will be granted, and is hopeful that deliveries will begin “soon.”
“General-purpose, open-source research and foundation models are the backbone of AI innovation,” Huang explained to reporters in D.C. “We believe that every civil model should run best on the U.S. technology stack, encouraging nations worldwide to choose America.”
“AI researchers are still doing AI research in China. If they don’t have enough NVIDIA, they will use their own,” Huang said at the time.
The concern from the White House is that shipping powerful AI chips to China poses a security threat. From NVIDIA’s perspective, however, the export controls do more harm than good by stifling investments from significant lost sales. During the same press conference, Huang pointed out that export controls resulted in NVIDIA’s market share in China dropping from 95% to 50%.
He also argued that the export restrictions serve to encourage China to design and build domestic AI chips faster, especially by Huawei.