Nvidia waits for U.S. approval to sell more powerful AI chip to China

Nvidia’s H200 is twice as powerful as the most powerful Nvidia AI accelerator the U.S. allows to be shipped to China

Even though a White House official, and the Commerce Department, refused to comment on the matter, the administration did release a quote which doesn’t mention anything about the matter at hand involving Nvidia. “The administration is committed to securing America’s global technology leadership and safeguarding our national security,” said the White House official. Those are standard objectives for every administration that has worked at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Nvidia’s H200 chip was launched a couple of years ago. With more high-bandwidth memory than the H100 AI accelerator, the H200 processes data faster. The chip is manufactured by TSMC using its 4nm process node and features the Hopper core architecture. It is also twice as powerful as Nvidia’s H20 GPU which is currently the most powerful AI chip from Nvidia that the U.S. will allow to be shipped to China. The Nvidia H200 is made for Large Language Models (LLM) and high-performance computing (HPC) units. It features 141GB of HBM3e memory, and 4.8TB/s of memory bandwidth.

U.S. approves the shipment of 70,000 Nvidia next-gen Blackwell AI chips to Saudia Arabia and the UAE

This past April, the Trump administration banned sales of the Nvidia H20 to China but reversed its position just a few short weeks later. The administration also announced this past week that it approved the export of up to 70,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips to Saudi Arabia’s Humain and G42 of the United Arab Emirates. The Blackwell chips are Nvidia’s next generation of AI accelerators.

While President Donald Trump has talked about tightening up on the export of U.S. tech to China, following a recent bilateral agreement between the U.S. and China, the Commerce Department will supposedly make changes to the U.S. chip export control policy. As part of the bilateral trade agreement, the U.S. agreed to lower to 48% its average tariff rate of Chinese imports to the U.S.

One estimate says Huawei’s Ascend AI accelerators own a 79% market share in China

Nvidia executives say that export limits prevent the company from offering a competitive data center product in China. This has opened up China to Nvidia rivals from other countries that don’t have limits on tech exports to China. And as we already pointed out, without Nvidia’s most powerful AI chips battling for market share in China, Huawei is able to sell its Ascend 910C AI accelerator, used to train AI models, in its own country. One bit of analysis claims that Huawei’s Ascend AI Accelerators have a vast 79% market share in the domestic AI accelerator market.