Reports suggest that Nvidia has already presented a B30 chip to the U.S. government for export approval to China. According to the Wall Street Journal, these talks began earlier this year, with the chip’s peak performance reaching only 80% of the standard Blackwell GPU’s performance.
President Donald Trump has commented that he will allow Nvidia to ship a Blackwell if it’s at least 30% less performant than the company’s top offering. “It is possible I would make a deal [on a] ‘somewhat enhanced in a negative way’ Blackwell processor,” Trump said to reporters. “In other words, take 30% to 50% off of it.” By comparison, the Nvidia HGX H20 is only around 50% of the performance of the full-fat H100, especially in multi-GPU setups.
The U.S. banned the sale of H20 in mid-April, resulting in a $5.5 billion write-off for Nvidia. However, it reversed this decision some three months later by issuing export licenses, allowing the company to resume sales in China in exchange for 15% of its sales in the country. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick stated that this was part of the negotiations for China to loosen its grip on rare-earth minerals — a crucial resource required to produce semiconductors, high-tech equipment, and defense technologies.
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