BEIJING:
US tech giant Nvidia announced Tuesday it will resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China after Washington pledged to remove licensing restrictions that had halted exports.
The California-based company produces some of the world’s most advanced semiconductors but cannot ship its most cutting-edge chips to China due to concerns that Beijing could use them to enhance military capabilities.
Nvidia developed the H20 — a less powerful version of its AI processing units — specifically for export to China. However, that plan stalled when the Trump administration tightened export licensing requirements in April.
“The US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company said in a statement Tuesday, adding it was “filing applications to sell the Nvidia H20 GPU again.”
CEO Jensen Huang, wearing his trademark black leather jacket, told reporters in a video published by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV: “I’m looking forward to shipping H20s very soon, and so I’m very happy with that very, very good news.”
Defending the policy change, Trump’s AI Czar David Sacks told CNBC the H20 was a “deprecated chip” that is “not anywhere close to the state of the art.”