Trump approves Nvidia H200 exports to China, with 25% fee attached — report suggests that companies will have to follow strict Beijing rules to import foreign chip, AMD and Intel to benefit from policy shift
The U.S. will allow Nvidia to export its H200 chips to "approved customers" in China, President Donald Trump announced on Monday, setting off a fresh round of political and regulatory manoeuvring on both sides of the Pacific.
The decision authorises shipments of Nvidia’s second-tier Hopper-generation chip in exchange for a 25% fee collected when parts arrive in the United States for security review before re-export. The Commerce Department is finalising the terms of the arrangement, which Trump said would also apply to AMD and Intel.
H200 sits below Nvidia’s latest Blackwell architecture yet remains far ahead of any processor China can legally import today. It is roughly six times more powerful than the H20, the downgraded model Nvidia specifically created to comply with earlier export controls. China restricted tech companies from buying the H20, arguing its performance gains over domestic alternatives were too modest to justify continued reliance on U.S. parts.
Trump’s announcement briefly lifted Nvidia’s share price, but the company’s prospects in China now potentially rest on decisions in Beijing as much as in Washington. The Financial Times reports that Chinese regulators have been discussing ways to allow only limited access to H200 — including an approval process where buyers must explain why domestic chips cannot meet their needs — and could bar the public sector from purchasing Nvidia hardware altogether. At the time of writing, no official confirmation of this has been released by the Chinese government.
The provisional opening nonetheless matters to China’s largest cloud providers. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have adopted domestic accelerators for some inference workloads but continue to prefer Nvidia products for training and maintaining large models, often sending jobs overseas where access to H100-class compute remains unrestricted. If allowed, H200 purchases would ease those workarounds, though companies would still have to navigate both governments’ approval systems.
Following the announcement, a group of senators described the move as a "colossal economic and national security failure", arguing that H200’s performance would give Chinese AI firms a meaningful lift. The bipartisan "SAFE CHIPS Act" introduced last week seeks to prevent the administration from approving exports of advanced chips, including H200, for 30 months.
The announcement also coincided with the Justice Department’s announcement of "Operation Gatekeeper", which alleges a smuggling network routed Nvidia parts into China and Hong Kong despite existing controls, piling yet more pressure on Washington to create a regulated channel for hardware that continues to leak across borders.
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Whether H200 reaches China at scale now depends on two competing gatekeepers. Washington is attempting to shape the market through controlled exports and taxes, while Beijing reportedly weighs measures that would keep foreign accelerators available only where domestic suppliers cannot yet compete.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
I support the idea of a broad-based sales tax on datacenter components, to help stop them choking the rest of the economy, though I know that's not why the 25% sales tax got added. I think it's just there as a "feel good" measure, to make it seem like we're getting something out of it. However, that added tax doesn't change whether it's the right or wrong thing to do.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out, or will it end up as the H20.
Will this be challenged in court under ArtI.S9.C5.1 Export Clause and Taxes that basically states "prohibits the federal government from imposing any tax or duty on goods exported from any U.S. state"
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C5-1/ALDE_00013596/
How much opposition will it face from congressman who do not want this type of tech available to China and other nations, and are looking at bills to restrict this type of trade.
Will China allow and want Nvidia and AMD technology, if so is there enough capacity to meet the demand?
This will not happen overnight if at all, it will take time.
This might not be as impactful as people might think.
This news seems missed one detail, which, according to Bloomberg:
Payment to the American government would come as a 25% tariff when the chips are shipped from manufacturing sites in Taiwan to the US for inspection by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security as part of a security review, according to a Commerce Department official. The chips would then be shipped to customers in China.
This will certainly cause severe safety concerns, on China's side.
earlier this year when H20 was allowed to sell, China implemented a new policy, that though all the companies can purchase the US chip solutions as they desire, and Chinese gov does not prohbit anyone from doing so, but the one who decided to purchase the US solutions other than Chinese equivalent has to sign a document, bear the consequences for potential future cyber security issues that directly caused by those products.
Rumors on the streets indicated that NO ONE dared to sign that doc, thus you saw the news of that "China didn't want H20".
People have no idea how bad the reputation of US chip solutions has become these days, especially after Israel's pager explosion saga.
