Nvidia’s China strategy is shifting once again. According to Reuters, the company has placed a fresh order for 300,000 H20 AI GPUs with TSMC, spurred by unexpectedly strong demand from Chinese tech giants. This move comes just weeks after the Trump administration reversed an April ban on the H20, a China-specific chip designed to comply with U.S. export controls but still powerful enough to dominate AI inference workloads.
The decision marks a reversal of Nvidia’s earlier stance. CEO Jensen Huang, during a recent visit to Beijing, had hinted that H20 production would remain paused unless customer demand justified a restart—something that would take nine months to spin up. But with existing stockpiles of 600,000–700,000 H20 units quickly dwindling, and reports of smuggling and a booming repair market for banned GPUs, Nvidia is clearly seeing enough momentum to justify new orders.
For context, the H20 is not a regular flagship GPU. While it lacks the raw power of Nvidia’s actual flagship H100 or the newer Blackwell series, industry insiders say it’s finely tuned for AI inference tasks, with some experts noting that it can even outperform the H100 in certain workloads. Chinese tech heavyweights like Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba had already stockpiled these chips ahead of the April ban, often pairing them with DeepSeek’s cost-optimized AI models.
You may like
-
Nvidia H20 AI GPU inventory is limited -
China plans 39 AI data centers with 115,000 restricted Nvidia Hopper GPUs -
Nvidia reportedly preparing RTX 6000D for Chinese market to comply with U.S. export controls
Yet the U.S. government has not fully cleared the path. Nvidia still requires export licenses for these shipments, and sources told Reuters that the Commerce Department has yet to approve them. In the meantime, Nvidia is asking Chinese customers to submit detailed order forecasts and documentation, signaling a more tightly controlled distribution pipeline.