Trump Team Floats Idea of Selling Nvidia H200 Chips to China

US officials are having early discussions on whether to let Nvidia Corp. sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, according to people familiar with the matter, a contentious potential move that would mark a major win for the world’s most valuable company.

President Donald Trump’s team has held internal talks about H200 chip shipments to the Asian country in recent days, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss a highly sensitive matter. No final decision has been made, the people emphasized, and it’s entirely possible that the idea remains an internal debate and never results in actual license approvals, which are required under export controls that Washington first imposed in 2022. Bloomberg's Kunjan Sobhani breaks down what this means for Nvidia, as well as China's place in the AI race.

Still, the fact that H200 shipments are being considered is a major departure from the Trump administration’s earlier public stances on semiconductor export controls. It would represent a concession to Beijing that would almost certainly draw widespread opposition from China hawks in Washington. It would also constitute a victory for Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang, who’s lobbied Trump’s team intensively for a reprieve from export controls that many within the administration consider crucial to US national security.

Nvidia shares climbed to a session high on the news Friday. They gained as much as 2% to $184.29 following earlier declines.

Nvidia said in a statement that the current regulatory landscape doesn’t allow it to offer a competitive data center product in China, “leaving that massive market to our rapidly growing foreign competitors.” Nvidia’s hardware is the industrial standard for AI development, making its chips the most coveted components for companies building facilities used to train and run AI models.

“Our foreclosure from the China data center compute market has no impact on our ability to supply customers in the USA,” the Santa Clara, California-based company added.

Nvidia has repeatedly emphasized that point this year, as it lobbies against legislation that would force the chipmaker to prioritize Americans over Chinese customers. The White House is urging lawmakers to reject that bill, which is in many ways a bipartisan attempt to safeguard against Trump green-lighting cutting-edge chip sales to the Asian country.

Representatives from the White House and the Commerce Department, which regulates exports, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment about the H200 discussions.

If realized, the H200 move would constitute a significant easing of US trade restrictions designed to curtail China’s prowess in artificial intelligence. The H200 is more powerful than the H20 processor, a chip designed specifically for the China market that is the most advanced model Washington currently approves for export. But both so-called AI accelerators are based on the previous-generation Hopper technology — rather than the current Blackwell line that Nvidia sells in the US.

Trump had earlier floated the possibility of discussing Blackwell chip exports with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The topic ultimately didn’t come up during recent talks, but his administration didn’t take exports of currently restricted AI chips completely off the table. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent later said he could imagine exporting Blackwell chips to China once they are no longer the most advanced — possibly in a year or two.

In the weeks since the Trump-Xi meeting, administration officials have continued to hold quiet discussions on what chips the US could be comfortable selling — that China could also approve of its companies using — according to people with knowledge of the talks.

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