Overview

• The U.S. Commerce Department granted export licenses this week, lifting the April ban and allowing Nvidia to resume H20 AI accelerator sales to Chinese customers.
• Nvidia will exhaust its existing H20 inventory without restarting production after taking a $4.5 billion write-down on unsold stock in Q1.
• The export relief formed part of recent U.S.-China trade negotiations on rare-earth minerals, leveraging chip permissions to secure critical resource access.
• Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that resumed H20 sales will remove a key hardware bottleneck and boost Chinese cloud providers’ AI spending by about 60 percent this year.
• Nvidia is preparing a Blackwell-architecture B30 GPU designed to comply with U.S. export controls and sustain its China market presence.