Tech war: Nvidia founder Huang visits Beijing amid US restrictions on H20 chips

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has made a surprise visit to Beijing, meeting Chinese officials a day after the US chip giant disclosed that Washington will now require a licence to export its H20 chips to China, a move the company expects to cost it US$5.5 billion.

According to posts on a social media account affiliated with China’s state-owned central television, Huang arrived in Beijing on Thursday at the invitation of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a state-backed body representing Chinese exporters.

Nvidia’s shares fell 6.9 per cent on Wednesday after it disclosed the H20 restrictions.

The H20 is a graphics processing unit (GPU) that was tailored for the Chinese market in response to earlier US export controls. Despite tightening restrictions, Chinese companies have continued to rely heavily on Nvidia chips to train and run large language models (LLMs), analysts said.

Nvidia’s China business is likely to “fall to nearly zero”, Morningstar analyst Brian Colello said, declining from about 10 per cent of total revenue last year, which was already significantly reduced from previous levels. “We don’t foresee a turnaround any time soon,” Colello said in a research note on Wednesday.

Nvidia began selling H20 chips to the Chinese market in early 2024, after its advanced A100, H100, A800 and H800 AI chips were all placed under US export controls due to national security concerns.

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