Nvidia (NVDA) shares erased their losses on Friday and turned higher after Bloomberg reported the Trump Administration has floated the idea of selling H200 GPUs to China.
Officials are still in the early stages of the discussion, and no final decision on the matter has been made, the news outlet added, citing people familiar with the matter.
An Nvidia spokesperson told Seeking Alpha that, “the regulatory landscape does not allow us to offer a competitive datacenter GPU in China, leaving that massive market to our rapidly growing foreign competitors. Our foreclosure from the China datacenter compute market has no impact on our ability to supply customers in the U.S.A.”
The discussions come amid a contentious time for the Trump Administration as it pertains to artificial intelligence regulations and letting companies such as Nvidia, AMD (AMD) and others to supply chips to competitor nations, such as China.
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers unveiled a bill in the House on Thursday that would restrict the purchase of Chinese chipmaking equipment by CHIPS Act grant recipients for 10 years. Nvidia did not receive money directly from the bipartisan CHIPS Act that was passed under President Biden, but its major manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), did.
In July, after months of back and forth talks with the U.S. government, Nvidia said it had received U.S. approval to sell a slimmed down version of its Hopper line of GPUs, the H20, to China. In its most recent quarter, Nvidia did not record any H20 revenue from China. The previous quarter did not see any H20 sales to China-based customers, but Nividia did benefit from a $180M release of previously reserved H20 inventory, from approximately $650M in unrestricted H20 sales to a customer outside of China.
Earlier this month, it was reported that the Chinese government had banned the use of foreign made AI chips in its state-funded data centers. The Chinese government has also previously told local firms to stop buying Nvidia’s AI GPUs.
In October, President Trump said he had not discussed the sale of Nvidia’s most powerful line of AI accelerators, its Blackwell series, during his meeting with Chinese Premier Xi Jinping.
The White House and U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Seeking Alpha.
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