Nvidia faces supply issues in China return – report

Supply constraints are expected to impact Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) as the AI chip giant is readying to meet a pent-up demand for its H20 graphics processing units, or GPUs, in China following a weeks-long ban in the country, The Information reported on Saturday.

In response to a rush of orders from Chinese tech giants such as ByteDance (BDNCE) and Alibaba (BABA) (OTCPK:BABAF), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) has reportedly told its customers that its stocks for H20 chips are limited, and the company has no plans to restart production anytime soon.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) said this week that it will resume sales of H20 GPUs to Chinese clients after the Trump administration’s assurances to issue export licenses.

However, fears of a potential policy reversal by the U.S. have led to a frenzied demand, prompting the company to address client expectations amid difficulties in urgently overcoming limitations in production capacity.

On one hand, the company had scrapped the manufacturing capacity reserved for the chips at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM) (OTC:TSMWF) following the April ban, according to two people familiar with the matter. With TSMC having shifted its H20 production lines to serve its other customers and its plants running at full capacity, a near-term reversal of those moves is unlikely.

Additionally, the production of new chips right from the beginning will take at least nine months, CEO Jensen Huang said in Beijing this week. That will force the company to fulfill its orders until its existing stock is depleted.

Meanwhile, SK Hynix, a South Korean supplier of NVDA, has informed that it has limited capacity to supply if the company places additional orders for certain advanced memory chips used in an upgraded version of the H20 that the company had been developing before the U.S. ban. It remains unclear whether the Trump administration’s export licenses will extend to the upgraded H20 chips.