Trump "Approves NVIDIA H200 Exports to China"

U.S. President Donald Trump said on the 8th (local time) that the United States will allow NVIDIA's H200 chips to be exported to "approved customers" in China and other regions under a series of conditions.

According to U.S. business outlet CNBC, President Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that "he informed Chinese President Xi Jinping that the United States would allow NVIDIA to export H200 products to approved customers in China and other countries under conditions that allow the U.S. to continue strengthening national security," and that "President Xi responded positively." He added, "The U.S. Department of Commerce is finalizing the details, and the same approach will apply to AMD, Intel and other great American companies."

He also said, "This policy will support U.S. job creation, strengthen U.S. manufacturing, and benefit U.S. taxpayers," and "We will protect national security, create American jobs, and maintain America's leading position in AI." He went on, "NVIDIA's U.S. customers are already advancing with the astonishing advanced Blackwell chips and the soon-to-be-released Rubin chips, and neither of these two chips are part of this negotiation," and emphasized, "The administration will always put America first."

The H200 is the highest-performing chip among those using the previous-generation 'Hopper' architecture. While it is behind the latest 'Blackwell'-based GPUs, it has overwhelming performance compared with the low-end chip 'H20,' which was approved for export to China. The H200 is reported to deliver twice the performance of the H20 for inference and more than six times the tensor-core compute performance used for AI training.

This decision came five days after President Trump met with Jensen Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, on the 3rd to discuss semiconductor export controls. At the time, when reporters asked after the meeting whether Huang had been informed of the decision on semiconductor exports, Trump replied only, "He knows."

Semafor reported that the H200's export allowance to China has the support of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick's assessment is that if this chip is exported to China it could increase NVIDIA's revenues and help maintain U.S. technology as the global standard. At the developer event (GTC) held in Washington D.C. at the end of October, CEO Huang said, "I hope the United States wins the AI competition (with China)," and emphasized that to do so it must enter the Chinese market.

Reporter Kim Chaeyeon why29@hankyung.com