NVIDIA can now sell its second-best H200 processors to China, not just the sanction-approved H20 model, which China previously refused to buy, President Trump wrote. social truth. The US will impose a 25% tariff on those sales, the Commerce Department announced. is confirmed Yesterday.
Trump said he had informed Chinese President Xi Jinping of the decision and that he had “responded positively”. The Commerce Department is finalizing the details, and the administration will take the same approach with AMD, Intel and other US companies. He added that the government will “protect national security”, so the recent Blackwell and Ruby lands were not part of the deal. The 25 percent rate would be higher than the 15 percent that the White House proposed in August.
Although the government does not allow NVIDIA to ship its latest high-end chips, it is said to fear that the company will lose sales to Huawei if it is completely excluded from the Chinese market. Reuters. No details have been released about how many H200 chips there are or which companies might buy them. “Offering the H200 to qualified commercial customers approved by the Department of Commerce strikes a smart balance that is good for the United States,” NVIDIA said in a statement.
However, the decision is not without controversy. Several Democratic US Senators I called him a “colossal economic and national security failure” that will help China’s industry and military. Republican Congressman John Mollenaar put it even more clearly. “NVIDIA should have no illusions that China is going to steal its technology, mass produce it and try to eliminate NVIDIA as a competitor,” he said.
Despite current restrictions on Blackwell B200 processors, these and other high-end NVIDIA chips have made their way to China via $1 billion worth of black market sales, according to previous reports. This model, along with the H100 and H200, is much more powerful than the H20 chip, which was designed to be sold in China to comply with export restrictions. NVIDIA said the B200 chip is nearly ten times faster than the H200 for some tasks, and the H200 is six times faster than the H20.
Washington’s approval does not mean China will buy NVIDIA chips, as Beijing has already told companies not to use American technology. Huawei is currently the most advanced company in this field and recently unveiled one three-year plan to overtake NVIDIA and AMD. AI chip experts love it, though Richard Windsor He said NVIDIA’s technology is still far beyond what Huawei or other Chinese companies can currently produce.