USA grants first licenses for export of Nvidia GPUs to China

The US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) has issued the first licenses for the export of Nvidia's H20 accelerators to China. A spokesperson for the authority confirmed this to the Financial Times. A general agreement in the years-long dispute over export licenses for particularly fast GPUs was already reached in mid-July 2025.

As reported by the Financial Times, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited President Donald Trump at the White House again last Wednesday. The two had already met three weeks earlier. Afterward, however, Huang is said to have waited in vain for the agreement reached to be implemented. The promised approvals had not been granted, which has now changed according to BIS.

China may no longer want H20 at all

Nvidia had repeatedly complained that the company would lose billions in sales due to export restrictions for the H20 accelerators. Time is of the essence: the GPU was introduced back in 2023 as a slower version of the fastest AI accelerator at the time, the H100, and is still based on the Hopper architecture. The current architecture, Blackwell, is significantly faster and more efficient than Hopper. In addition, Chinese authorities recently raised concerns about possible deliberate security vulnerabilities in the H20 GPUs. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) claims, among other things, that Nvidia can shut down the GPUs remotely and determine their location. There is no evidence of this so far.

Black market for AI GPUs in China

Local tracking for the GPUs does not appear to exist yet, or it is not being used. This is indicated by a new video project by YouTube channel Gamers Nexus (GN), which has also been investigating the hardware industry recently. In a video released over the weekend, GN announces a documentary that aims to shed light on the black market for GPUs in China. The GN team recently spent three weeks traveling through China and Taiwan for the film.

It's not just about gaming graphics cards converted for AI data centers, which are made fit for AI use with particularly large models with increased memory, for example. The announcement video also shows standard AI accelerators from Nvidia, which should be readily available in China despite export restrictions. It is still unclear how large this black market really is and how much it can promote China's AI development. In large AI data centers today, hundreds of thousands of the fastest GPUs are sometimes installed in one location.

(nie)