Nvidia's fight to sell advanced AI chips to China

In April 2025, Nvidia said it expected a $5.5 billion charge after the Trump administration placed new restrictions on exports of its H20 chips to China.^[2] Huang flew to Beijing for talks, according to reports.^[8] He reportedly called the curbs a "failure" in May, saying they would push Chinese rivals to develop their own chips.^[9] In July, Nvidia said it would resume H20 sales in China after receiving assurances from the administration.^[10] China then questioned the H20's security, and Nvidia said its chips had no "backdoors."^[11] In August, Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15% of their revenue from chip sales to China in exchange for export licenses.^[3] In December, Trump said he would allow sales of the H200 to approved customers in China,^[4] and in January 2026 the Commerce Department set security requirements for them.^[5]

Prosecutors have also charged people with smuggling Nvidia chips and servers to China. In March 2026, a senior vice president of Super Micro Computer and two others affiliated with the company were charged with conspiring to smuggle servers containing Nvidia chips.^[12] In August, Taiwan charged nine people, including Nvidia and Super Micro employees,^[13] and in October a California man was accused of smuggling $300 million in restricted hardware.^[14] In November, Nvidia told data center partners worldwide to keep Chinese customers below half their cloud computing business, according to people familiar with the matter.^[15] A Chinese university with deep ties to the People's Liberation Army bought H200 chips in October despite being on a US export blacklist,^[16] and a report found that a top Chinese AI lab had accessed Nvidia's most advanced chips that summer.^[17] Megaspeed, the Singapore-based company under US investigation over chips diverted to China, pledged to cooperate with the inquiry,^[18] after a report that Nvidia had intervened in the probe.^[19] The spy scandal around Huang is followed in its own Story.