The US Commerce Department has begun issuing licenses to Nvidia for exporting its H20 chips to China, ending weeks of delay following CEO Jensen Huang’s meetings with President Donald Trump at the White House.
A US official said that the Bureau of Industry and Security—the division of the Commerce Department responsible for export controls—had started approving licenses for the H20 chip. Nvidia developed this chip specifically for the Chinese market after the Biden administration imposed restrictions on exporting more advanced AI chips.
In April, the Trump administration initially blocked Nvidia from selling the H20 to China. However, after Huang’s White House visit and direct lobbying of the president, Trump reversed the decision. Despite this, Nvidia grew frustrated when three weeks passed without the issuance of any licenses.
Huang met Trump again at the White House on Wednesday. According to sources close to the matter, the Commerce Department began issuing the licenses two days after this meeting. One insider indicated that Huang’s Oval Office discussion with Trump influenced the decision to proceed with the export approvals.
Both Nvidia and the Commerce Department declined to comment.
Security experts warn of risks
The H20 chip has sparked debate among US security officials, who argue that allowing China to acquire it could bolster its military capabilities. Nvidia warns that restricting US technology exports will only accelerate China’s independent innovation.
Last week, the Financial Times reported that 20 security experts—including former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger and a recent National Security Council member, David Feith—sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urging him to block H20 sales to China. They called the approval a “strategic misstep,” threatening the US’s economic and military advantage in AI.
Nvidia dismissed this criticism as “misguided,” rejecting claims that China would use the H20 to enhance its military power.
The original export restrictions cost Nvidia $4.5 billion in the July quarter, with an additional $2.5 billion in missed sales, surprising the company and its Chinese customers, who had been told business would continue. The ban effectively ended legal sales of Nvidia’s AI chips in China, a market Huang estimates will reach $50 billion in the next two to three years.
Nvidia had forecasted an $8 billion revenue shortfall from China for the July quarter, but was exploring redesigning its AI chips to comply with the new export rules.
Huang has warned that US restrictions risk ceding technological ground to Chinese competitors like Huawei in the global AI hardware race. He noted that Nvidia’s market share in China fell from 95% to 50% over four years as local rivals advanced, calling US export policies a “failure.”
Nvidia pushes back against government surveillance demands on AI chips
Nvidia has pushed back sharply against any government attempts to build surveillance access into its chips, arguing that GPUs must remain free of “backdoors” and remote kill switches. In a Tuesday blog post titled “No Backdoors. No Kill Switches. No Spyware.” Chief Security Officer David Reber Jr. wrote that Nvidia’s GPUs—widely used to train and run AI models across Big Tech and startups—“do not and should not have kill switches and backdoors.”
The stance comes after Chinese officials raised concerns last week about possible “backdoor security risks” in Nvidia’s H20 chips, a version tailored for the Chinese market, and requested a meeting with the company, The New York Times reported. Nvidia warned that permitting covert access or control of its chips would make the technology more vulnerable and would “fracture trust in US technology.”
Big tech firms have previously resisted similar proposals. Apple, for example, has long opposed software backdoors. CEO Tim Cook famously likened them to “the software equivalent of cancer.” The company fought an FBI demand in 2016 to build custom software to unlock a shooter’s iPhone and, earlier this year, resisted what it described as a secret UK government order seeking backdoor access to iCloud data.
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