H20, the Highest-Spec Chip Legally Exportable to China
Jensen Huang Attends Mar-a-Lago Dinner
Trump Administration Changes Its Mind
The Donald Trump administration in the United States reportedly withdrew its plan to restrict the export of Nvidia's H20 chip to China, according to a report by the U.S. public broadcaster NPR on the 9th (local time).
Amid the U.S. restrictions on the export of cutting-edge semiconductors to China, the H20 is the highest-specification artificial intelligence (AI) chip that can be legally supplied to China. The H20 is also known as one of the chips used by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek.
While its performance is lower than Nvidia's latest AI chip Blackwell, the H20 is equipped with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) used in Blackwell, resulting in some performance improvements.
The previous Biden administration had been preparing additional export controls in the last few months of its term, and the H20 was reportedly included in these measures.
NPR, citing sources, reported that the additional export controls were scheduled to be implemented this week, but after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attended a dinner last week at Mar-a-Lago, where former President Trump resides, the H20 was removed from the regulation list.
At the dinner, CEO Huang pledged investment in AI data centers within the U.S., and subsequently, the Trump administration decided to allow the export of the H20. However, the specific scale of the investment promised by CEO Huang has not been disclosed.
Earlier, IT specialized media The Information reported that Chinese tech giants Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance ordered more than $16 billion (23.5 trillion won) worth of Nvidia's AI chip H20 from January to March this year. As U.S. government semiconductor export restrictions against China were expected to expand to include the H20, Chinese companies were interpreted to have secured their supply in advance.
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