Nvidia chief expects China to allow US AI chip imports

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a Bloomberg Television interview on May 18 that he expects China will eventually allow imports of US AI chips, days after joining President Donald Trump’s business delegation for meetings with Xi Jinping in Beijing.

Huang said he did not directly discuss Nvidia’s effort to sell H200 chips in China with Chinese officials, though the issue came up between both governments, and Trump later said the chip “did come up” in his talks.

Trump agreed in December to let Nvidia ship H200 chips to China, and the US Commerce Department later issued licenses, but Chinese companies have not completed purchases as Beijing pushes semiconductor self-sufficiency and support for local firms such as Huawei.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg

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Huawei narrows the gap while Nvidia keeps a wide lead

As Beijing weighs more Nvidia chip purchases, Huawei still trails the US company in high-end hardware.
Huawei’s top chip, the Ascend 910C, falls short of Nvidia’s H200 in computing power and memory bandwidth 1.
Chinese suppliers can now make chips that rival Nvidia’s H20, the cut-down processor built for China before Washington halted shipments, though they still lag the H200 1.
Nvidia also keeps a software edge through CUDA, the platform many developers use for AI work. Rewriting code for domestic chips remains expensive for Chinese teams 1.

A China deal could deepen a two-tier global AI market

The H200 is not Nvidia’s newest chip. It runs on the Hopper architecture, which came before Blackwell 1.
Blackwell systems can handle some AI models up to 10 times faster, leaving Chinese companies with a lower performance ceiling than peers in other markets 1.
Even with US approval, Nvidia would owe the US government 25% of H200 sales to China, which raises costs and gives local chip efforts more room to grow 2.
The opening could restore a market worth US$50 billion a year, Huang has said. Huawei also plans an Ascend chip for 2027 that could roughly match the H200’s computing power 2.