The U.S. recently lowered the bar for the AI chips that required export licenses, meaning specialty chips like the Nvidia H20 — which, surprisingly, still sells well despite being defanged — are no longer legal to sell in China. This has led to rampany speculation that the RTX 5090D will also be included in the ban, even though its AI performance was reduced by 23% from the full-fat version, and it also lost other features like multi-GPU configuration. Unfortunately, this ban seems to be the case as popular hardware leaker HXL shared a WeChat post on X (formerly Twitter) reporting Nvidia's cancellation of 5090D orders.
According to the original post [machine translated], "Nvidia has basically confirmed that RTX 5090D series GPUs cannot be ordered in Q2. All orders for 5090D chips that have been placed and undelivered POs have been temporarily cancelled, which means that RTX 5090D has been officially banned from sale." Channel Gate Vision Conversion posted on the WeChat Official Accounts Platform, suggesting that it is a Chinese business or news outlet.
Even though the RTX 5090D has reduced performance versus the RTX 5090 (which can be used for smaller-scale AI training), Chinese manufacturers still use the former to build systems for AI training. We've even seen a blower-style RTX 5090D leak on Bilibili with the same GB202 chip found on the RTX 5090 and 32GB of GDDR7 VRAM. So, it's likely that when the White House lowered the performance threshold on the ban, this GPU was also affected.
However, Nvidia hasn't made any official statement yet regarding the discontinuation of the RTX 5090D. Aside from that, the statement said "temporarily," so there is a chance that Team Green is still negotiating with the U.S. government to allow it to continue selling the 5090D or at least liquidate its remaining stocks. Jensen Huang reportedly spent a million dollars to join a presidential dinner at Mar-a-Lago in early April, where he was supposedly able to secure a suspension on the Nvidia H20 ban that was set to go live that month. Despite that, the White House went ahead with the export restrictions, which led to Nvidia writing off $5.5 billion in lost sales and other opportunities.
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