American chipmaking giant Nvidia (NVDA) says it plans to resume sales to China of an artificial intelligence chip that’s become part of a global race pitting the world’s biggest economies against each other.
The company’s announcement on Monday comes after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump at the White House last week. Huang has argued that restricting sales of American technology to China could put the US position as a global AI leader at risk — and the company had also said the restrictions were causing it to miss out on billions of dollars in lost revenue.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Bloomberg in an interview Tuesday that the Nvidia export controls have been a “negotiating chip” in the larger US-China trade talks, in which the two countries have made a deal to lower tariffs charged on one another.
Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, and last week became the first publicly traded firm to reach a valuation of $4 trillion, thanks to its role in the artificial intelligence market. The company’s chips are used to power technologies ranging from AI chatbots to robotics and self-driving cars.
Nvidia released the H20 chip last year as a way to maintain access to the Chinese market — which made up 13% of the company’s sales in 2024 — in the face of strict US export controls.
But in April, the White House told the company it would need a special license to export the H20 to China, forcing the company to halt sales. The H20 is widely believed to have contributed to DeepSeek, an advanced Chinese AI model.
On Monday, Nvidia said that it had applied to sell the H20 in China again and received assurances from the US government that those licenses will be approved, allowing the company to “start deliveries soon.”
The US government has sought to block China’s use of American technology to advance its military and AI systems.
But Huang has argued that if American technology companies are restricted from selling to China, Chinese developers will simply create their own, which could undermine US leadership.
“In order for America to be the world leader, just like we want the world to be built on the American dollar, using the American dollar as a global standard, we want the American tech stack to be the global standard,” Huang told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in an interview that aired Sunday. “We love that the internet is created by American technology and is built on American technology, and so we should continue to aspire to that.”
Story Continues