Two people familiar with the goings-on told the FT that Chinese regulators have been weighing up a scheme that gives limited access to the H200, Nvidia’s second-strongest artificial intelligence chip.
They said buyers would likely face an approval slog that involves justifying why local silicon cannot handle the job. They added that officials have not settled on a final plan.
Trump fired up Truth Social on 15 April 2025 and claimed he told Chinese president Xi Jinping that the US would let Nvidia “ship its H200 products to approved customers in China … under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security. President Xi responded positively!”
He announced that “$25 per cent will be paid to the United States of America”. No one seems to know how that would work, and a previous scheme to let Nvidia sell its weaker H20 chip in exchange for 15 per cent of the revenues stalled because neither Trump nor Nvidia can find a legal way to funnel the cash.
Shipments of the H200 and other top-tier AI parts into China were already off limits under the Biden administration due to fears they could end up powering the military.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has been pestering Washington to open the taps. Supporters of the move, such as White House AI tsar David Sacks, insist it will help the US by keeping Beijing hooked on American technology. Critics mutter that the plan hands China a sizeable leg up.
China has been using the blockade to whip its chipmakers into shape and to get them building rivals to Nvidia’s gear. Officials have tightened customs checks on chip imports and offered energy subsidies to data centres that agree to use domestic parts.
The National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology are the two outfits driving Beijing’s semiconductor self-reliance crusade. The people familiar with the talks said the regulators could add extra hurdles to keep homegrown chips competitive, including outlawing H200 purchases across the public sector.
Tech giants Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent would all welcome Nvidia’s smarter kit. They have been dabbling with Chinese chips for simple AI tasks, but still prefer Nvidia’s faster hardware because it is easier to run and maintain. Many of them now train their AI models outside China to reach the banned Nvidia stock.
Trump’s cheerleading has not gone down smoothly in Congress. A bipartisan bunch of senators has filed a bill that would stop the administration from approving exports of parts such as the H200 to Beijing for 30 months.
The odds of the law passing remain fuzzy because few Republicans, including those who demanded harsher export limits during the Biden era, have taken a swing at Trump for his H200 move.
China already slapped limits on Nvidia’s H20 despite Trump giving sales the nod, arguing that the chip’s performance hardly improved over local alternatives.