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Nvidia is making fresh preparations to start selling its AI chips in China after receiving “many” US government approvals and product orders from Chinese customers within the past two weeks.
Chief executive Jensen Huang on Tuesday said Nvidia had restarted manufacturing H200 AI chips to sell to China after telling partners to pause production earlier this year due to uncertainty around regulatory approval.
“We’ve been licensed for many customers in China for the H200. We have received purchase orders from many customers. And we are in the process of restarting our manufacturing,” Huang told reporters at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in San Jose.
The situation was “different than it was two weeks ago . . . our supply chain is getting fired up”, he added.
Nvidia has been battling to regain access to the Chinese market for its advanced AI chips for almost a year, as it navigates US President Donald Trump’s volatile trade policy towards Beijing.
Under its latest deal with the White House, announced in December, Nvidia is permitted to sell Chinese customers the H200 chips — which are a generation behind its current products — while giving the US a 25 per cent cut of income from these sales.
Nvidia restarted production of the H200 following the deal. But it ran up against longer-than-expected US national security reviews of the licences as well as hesitancy from Beijing to authorise imports on a large scale. Nvidia then paused production.
The US commerce department said on Tuesday that it did not share information about licences.
Huang’s latest comments suggest Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba and ByteDance could soon have access to Nvidia’s AI technology. Chinese regulators must still approve the import of the chips.
Trump’s break with historically tight US export controls on advanced semiconductors used to develop cutting-edge AI models has prompted pushback from national security hawks in Washington.
“President Trump’s intention is that US should have a leadership position and access to Nvidia’s best technology,” Huang said on Tuesday. “However, he would also like us to compete worldwide and not concede those markets unnecessarily.”
Huang has said China’s AI chip market could be worth up to $50bn, offering a significant revenue stream for the $4.5tn chip company.
On Monday, Trump asked to postpone a long-awaited summit with China’s President Xi Jinping, where AI technology exports were expected to be discussed, as he grapples with the war with Iran.
Additional reporting by Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
