Trump permits Nvidia to sell advanced chips in China, CEO says

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, says the chipmaker has won approval from the Trump administration to sell its advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence to China.

“Today, I’m announcing that the US government has approved for us filing licenses to start shipping H20s,” Huang told reporters in Beijing.

The news came in a company blog post late on Monday.

“The US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon,” the post said.

Huang also spoke about the coup on China’s state-run CGTN television network in remarks shown on X. Chinese buyers have lined up to buy the semiconductors in response to the news, according to early reports.

“It’s so innovative and dynamic here in China that it’s really important that American companies are able to compete and serve the market,” he said. He noted that half of the world’s AI researchers are in China.

Huang recently met with Donald Trump and other US policymakers and this week is in Beijing to attend a supply chain conference and speak with Chinese officials. The broadcast showed the executive meeting with Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for Promotion of International Trade, host of the China International Supply Chain Expo, which Huang was attending. Nvidia is an exhibitor.

Nvidia has profited enormously from rapid adoption of AI, becoming the first company to have its market value surpass $4tn last week. However, the trade rivalry between the US and China has been weighing heavily on the company and the industry writ large.

Washington has been tightening controls on exports of advanced technology to China for years, citing concerns that knowhow meant for civilian use could be deployed for military purposes. The emergence of China’s DeepSeek AI chatbot in January renewed concerns over how China might use the advanced chips to help develop its own AI capabilities that would compete with those from the US.

In January, before Trump began his second term in office, the Biden administration launched a new framework for exporting advanced computer chips used to develop artificial intelligence, an attempt to balance national security concerns about the technology with the economic interests of producers and other countries. Then in April, Trump’s White House announced that it would restrict sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips and AMD’s MI308 chips to China.

Nvidia had said the tighter export controls would cost the company an extra $5.5bn, and Huang and other technology leaders have been lobbying Trump to reverse the restrictions. They argue that such limits hinder US competition in a leading-edge sector in one of the world’s largest markets for technology.

They’ve also warned that US export controls could end up pushing other countries toward China’s AI technology.