(March 18): Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang said the company is firing up manufacturing of H200 artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators for customers in China, a sign of progress in the chipmaker’s effort to re-enter the vital market.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Huang said Nvidia had been licensed for “many customers in China” for H200 sales and is in the process of “restarting our manufacturing”. That outlook is different than it was a couple of weeks ago, he said.
“Our supply chain is getting fired up,” Huang said during the event, part of the company’s annual GTC conference in San Jose, California. The company unveiled a flurry of new products at the expo on Monday and gave investors a financial update on Tuesday morning.
Nvidia has been working to re-establish sales of its AI processors in China, a market that was virtually closed to such products by US export restrictions. The Trump administration has begun allowing Nvidia and rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc to sell less-powerful versions of their chips in the country, but licences from the US government are required.
For now, Nvidia has held off on including any China data centre revenue from its financial forecasts.
During a conference call last month, the company said it had only secured one licence from the US to ship a small number of its H200 accelerators to China. Though the H200 is less advanced than Nvidia’s current AI accelerators — used to train and run AI models — it’s still more powerful than what’s available locally in the country.
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Nvidia shares fell less than 1% to US$181.93 ($232.19) in New York trading on Tuesday. That leaves them down 2.5% for the year.
China, which used to make up a quarter of Nvidia’s revenue, now only accounts for a small fraction. Though global demand for Nvidia’s chips remains strong, the Asian nation is the largest single market for semiconductors. That makes it important to Nvidia’s long-term prosperity.
Nvidia earned US President Donald Trump’s blessing to sell H200s to Chinese customers back in December, but the company has yet to tally any revenue from such sales. Rule-makers in Washington have also imposed hurdles that slowed formal approvals and make a return to unfettered sales unlikely.
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H200 shipments to China are subject to a US inspection and a 25% duty. Officials are also considering capping H200 sales to 75,000 chips per Chinese customer, with total shipments reaching up to one million processors, Bloomberg has reported.
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