TMTPOST -- Nvidia Corporation CEO Jensen Huang on Monday cautioned the leading chipmaker lose tens of billions in sale in China due to the latest export ban on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips imposed by the Trump administration.
Credit：Nvidia
The additional ban on Nvidia’s H20 is “deeply painful” as the company has written off $5.5 billion, Huang said in in a Stratechery interview published on Monday, adding that “no company in history has ever written off that much inventory.” Then he said the ban suggested a $15 billion loss in sales.
“[The export ban] Its costs are enormously costly, not only am I losing $5.5 billion, we wrote off $5.5 billion, we walked away from $15 billion of sales and probably — what is it? — $3 billion worth of taxes,” Huang said.” The China market is about $50 billion a year and it’s not $50 million, it’s $50 billion. $50 billion is like Boeing, not the plane, the whole company.”
Huang suggested Nvidia has to change its product portfolio in the Chinese market due to the ban on H20 chips. “That’s the limit of what we can do to Hopper, and we’ve cut it down to there’s not much left to cut,” the chief executive said.
Huang acknowledged that the ban is a real threat to the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) in the long run. CUDA is a computing platform that has made it easier for deelopers to create complex programs and enabled Nvidia to build a community of developers key to maintaining its lead in AI.
"Anybody who thought that one chess move to somehow ban China from H20s would somehow cut off their ability to do AI is deeply uninformed," said Huang. He continued: ““If we don’t compete in China, and we allow the Chinese ecosystem to build a rich ecosystem because we’re not there to compete for it, and new platforms are developed and they’re not American at a time when the world is diffusing AI technology, their leadership and their technology will diffuse all around the world.”
H20, which is modified to have lower performance than other Nvidia chips, is the most advanced AI chips that Nvidia can export to China under the current export rules. Many in the semiconductor industry had feared the H20 chip would be one of new targets of the U.S. government because it is one of the chips that Chinese AI upstart DeepSeek used to train its popular reasoning AI model R1.
Nvidia disclosed on April 9 that it was informed by the U.S. government the same day that the government requires a license for export to China, including its two special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau, of the company’s “H20 integrated circuits and any other circuits achieving the H20's memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth, or combination thereof.”
The U.S. government indicated the license requirement addresses the risk that the covered products may be used in, or diverted to, a supercomputer in China, according to the filling. Nvidia in the filling thus estimated its first quarter of fiscal year 2026 ending on April 27 will see about $5.5 billion of charges regarding H20 products associated with H20 products for inventory, purchase commitments, and related reserves.
Nvidia later April said that the U.S. government on April 21 informed Nvidia the licence requirement will be in effect for the indefinite future.
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