Overview

• The U.S. government formally banned Nvidia's H20 AI chip exports to China on April 15, requiring licenses for future shipments.
• ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent preemptively ordered approximately one million H20 GPUs in late 2024, valued at over $12 billion, to mitigate anticipated restrictions.
• It remains unclear whether Nvidia fulfilled all orders before the ban, with U.S. authorities and TSMC investigating potential illicit transactions.
• The H20 chip, a less powerful variant designed to comply with earlier U.S. export rules, has been critical for China's AI applications, including large language models and cloud services.
• Chinese companies are accelerating domestic semiconductor development and exploring alternatives, such as Huawei's Ascend chips, to reduce reliance on U.S. technology.