Clearing the way for exports to China, the US has approved licenses for NVIDIA’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 GPUs.
The US Department of Commerce eased the ban on exporting NVIDIA’s less powerful H20 chips to China in July 2025. This came after NVIDIA CEOJensen Huang met with US President Donald Trump, finalising plans to resume filing licences to restart shipping H20 chips.
Following this, AMD also confirms its plan to resume exporting its MI308 AI chip to the Chinese market. Subsequently, the stock of both NVIDIA and AMD rose by 4 per cent and 6 per cent, with the market cap rising to $161 billion, recovering from an estimated loss of $800 million.
In April 2025, the US Department of Commerce banned GPU makers like NVIDIA and AMD from exporting chips like H20 and MI308 to China, aiming to protect national security, causing NVIDIA’s stock to fall 6.3 per cent and a loss of 5.5 billion dollars in market cap in the Q1 of 2025.
Huang has repeatedly stated that export controls could limit US power in the advancing world of AI and force countries like China to look inward for innovation and alternative hardware solutions, possibly buoying the country’s efforts rather than stalling them.
China is reportedly one of the largest buyers of NVIDIA’s H20 chips, even though this is not NVIDIA’s flagship chip. It is relatively cheap compared to its advanced and powerful AI chips.
Chinese engineers have optimised their CUDA software to build and test AI models on this H20, efficiently and at a lower cost.
