NVIDIA could experience more China GPU export restrictions from the Trump administration

The Trump administration is looking at increased sanctions on the sale of NVIDIA AI chips to China, according to "people familiar with the matter" in a new report from Bloomberg.

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US officials are looking to expand restrictions to cover NVIDIA's H20 AI GPUs, which can be used to develop and run AI software and services, acting as a scaled-down AI GPU that was designed to meet US export restrictions, and allowed onto the shores of China.

Bloomberg reports that the "people added that a decision on any restrictions is likely a long ways off, given that the Trump administration is only beginning to staff up in relevant departments. Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, Trump's pick to lead the agency that oversees chip trade curbs, said during a confirmation hearing Wednesday that he would be "very strong" on semiconductor controls, without providing more specifics".

• Read more: NVIDIA's tweaked H20 AI GPU enters mass production in Q2 2024, destined for China

An NVIDIA spokesperson said in a statement that the company is "is ready to work with the administration as it pursues its own approach to AI".

NVIDIA's tweaked H20 AI GPU is a cut-down version of the H100, with 96GB of HBM3 memory with up to 4.0TB/sec of memory bandwidth. There are 296 TFLOPs of compute power, and the H100 AI GPU die with a performance density of 2.9 TFLOPs/die, compared to the 19.4 TFLOPs/die of the regular H100 AI GPU.

• Read more: DeepSeek R1 trained on NVIDIA H800 AI GPUs, inferencing on Huawei 910C
• Read more: President Trump plans tariffs on foreign semiconductors, says DeepSeek AI success 'a positive'