Nvidia Gets US Green Light to Sell Better AI Chips to China

Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plan to resume sales of some AI chips in China after securing Washington’s assurances that such shipments would get approved, a dramatic reversal from the Trump administration’s earlier stance on measures designed to limit Beijing’s AI ambitions.

US government officials told Nvidia they would green-light export licenses for its H20 artificial intelligence accelerator, the company said in a blog post on Monday — a move that may add billions to Nvidia’s revenue this year, restoring its ability to fulfill orders it had written off as lost due to government restrictions. Nvidia designed the less-advanced H20 chip to comply with earlier China trade curbs from Washington, which Trump’s team tightened in April to block H20 sales to the Asian country without a US permit.

AMD received similar assurances from the US Commerce Department and plans to restart shipments of its MI308 chips to China once licenses for sales are approved, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Shares of AMD jumped more than 5% in pre-market trading while Nvidia rose as much as 4.5%.

Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang — who met with President Donald Trump last week and is currently in Beijing attending a government-sponsored conference — appeared on Chinese state broadcaster CCTV shortly after Nvidia announced the decision, saying the company had secured approval to begin shipping. The Commerce Department, which oversees US export controls on chips and the tools used to make them, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the agency has already issued any H20 licenses.

The US move comes after weeks of thawing relations between Washington and Beijing, guided by an opaque trade truce that’s designed to see both sides approve exports of crucial technologies. After meeting his Chinese counterpart last week, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there’s a “strong desire on both sides” for a meeting between Trump and President Xi Jinping later this year.

Washington in recent weeks has lifted a spate of export controls — including on chip design software — imposed ahead of last month’s trade talks in London. That’s in return for China allowing more sales of rare-earth minerals needed to make a range of high-tech products, something US negotiators thought they’d achieved the month prior during talks in Geneva. Throughout and after those negotiations, Trump’s team insisted that controls on Nvidia’s H20 chips were not up for discussion.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acknowledged Tuesday that the restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 chips had come up during the talks in London. The two sides emerged from those discussions with an agreement that paved the way for China to resume shipments of rare earths to American customers and the US to ease some export curbs, including on chip-design software.

“You might say that that was a negotiating chip that we used in Geneva and in London,” Bessent said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “It was all part of a mosaic. They had things we wanted, we had things they wanted.”

Bloomberg Tech Europe host Tom Mackenzie joins Stephen Carroll and Caroline Hepker on Daybreaak Europe Radio to discuss.''

The about-face marks a massive win for Huang, who has branded US chip curbs a “failure” that fueled the rise of Huawei Technologies Co. as Nvidia’s top Chinese rival. H20 shipments also would be a boon to companies from DeepSeek to Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. that — despite Huawei’s semiconductor progress — seek Nvidia hardware to train, expand and operate the AI services they’re building to compete with the likes of OpenAI.

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