Nvidia, chief executive Jensen Huang said his outfit has restarted manufacturing of H200 processors for sale in China.
For those who came in late, Nvidia has been doing a messy tango with the Trump administration over which AI chips it can ship into the world’s second-largest market. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the H20, a chip built for China, then reversed course in August.
Chinese officials reportedly leaned on local customers to avoid the H20, while Nvidia chased licences for its newer Blackwell gear. In late August, Nvidia halted production of the H20 chip.
In December, the US. said Nvidia could sell the H200 into China, so long as the company shared 25 per cent of its sales with the US. government. The H200 sits a generation behind Nvidia’s top GPUs, the chips used to train AI models.
In late January, after Huang visited China, officials there signalled they would approve H200 sales too. Even so, the situation stayed murky in Nvidia’s latest earnings, where it said it had approval to ship “small amounts of H200 products” to China, but “to date we have not generated any revenue” from them.
Speaking to the gathered throngs at GTC in San Jose, Huang said: “We’ve been licensed for many customers in China. We’ve received purchase orders from many customers, and we’re in the process of restarting our manufacturing… Our supply chain is getting fired up,” Huang said.
Nvidia would not say what it expects to pull in from H200 sales, though it has previously claimed the China market for its AI processors could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year.
The market was not impressed by Huang’s chatter and a pledge to use 50 per cent of future free cash flow on share buybacks and other investor-friendly tricks, with shares closing at $181.93, down 0.7 per cent.
