Nvidia’s China-exclusive RTX 6000D reportedly gets lukewarm reception in China due to hobbled performance — could leave Nvidia with huge backlog of unwanted GPUs

Nvidia’s RTX6000D, the China-first card initially designed to fill the void left by the banned (and then unbanned) Nvidia H20, has received very little interest in China, according to Reuters, amidst ongoing trade tensions. Estimates by JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley suggest Nvidia may be on track to produce between 1.5 and 2 million of these GPUs before the end of the year, potentially leaving it sitting on a huge stack of unwanted cards.

The specific array of graphics cards that Nvidia is allowed to sell to Chinese firms has fluctuated wildly in 2025 as the Trump administration has initiated on-again, off-again tariffs and trade blockages, particularly in relation to high-end technology like GPUs aimed at AI training and inference. To comply with these regulations, Nvidia has churned out Chinese-specific GPUs like the RTX 5090D and H20.

The RTX6000D is the latest development in this space, and was reportedly initially designed as a solution to the ban on H20 exports to the country. Although the H20 is now available once again, and Nvidia is talking up its B30A replacement based on the newer Blackwell architecture, the RTX6000D was an additional GPU design that could have found favor among AI firms scrambling for GPU power. But with ongoing trade negotiations and a major drive within China to prioritize domestically produced chips, Nvidia is said to be struggling to find buyers for the new card.

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The Reuters sources claim the RTX6000D only started shipping this week, but its performance has been rated lower than Nvidia’s bog-standard 5090, which isn’t available in China. However, it has been readily available on black and grey markets in China for months now, and there are even modded versions doing the rounds with massively expanded memory capacities for even more AI performance.