Trump seeing green as he weighs deal to allow Nvidia Blackwell GPU sales to China
(2025/08/11)
- Reference: 1754943762
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/08/11/trump_seeing_green_as_he/
- Source link:
Nerfed versions of Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs could soon join its H20 on the list of AI accelerators approved for sale in China.
Speaking to the press on Monday, US President Donald Trump suggested he'd be willing to entertain a deal to allow shipments of an "enhanced" version of Nvidia's Blackwell chips. "In other words, take 30 percent to 50 percent off of it," Trump said, according to [1]Bloomberg .
As we previously [2]disclosed , AMD has reportedly entered into a similar arrangement regarding shipments of its own China-spec part, the MI308. In April, the Trump administration briefly blocked sales of the cards after it issued new restrictions on the export of high-end AI accelerators to China.
[3]
The Trump admin lifted those restrictions in July, granting Nvidia and AMD export licenses allowing them to resume sales to Chinese customers. However, as we reported earlier this week, those licenses [4]didn't come cheap .
[5]
[6]
During the press conference, Trump confirmed that he'd hammered out a deal with Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang to allow sales of its H20 GPUs in exchange for a 15 percent share of the revenues. By our estimates, the US government will be raking in somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 million a quarter or or more.
You can bet that any deal to allow shipments of Blackwell accelerators will almost certainly mean additional kickbacks for Uncle Sam.
[7]
While Nvidia has teased a new Blackwell-based part for the Chinese market, details remain limited. Nvidia declined to comment on future Blackwell chips, but emphasized the importance of maintaining US leadership in the emerging AI infrastructure market.
"We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide. America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's AI tech stack can be the world's standard if we race," a company spokesperson said.
Previous reports have [8]suggested that Nvidia may offer a cut down version of its RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell accelerators, announced back at GTC in March, for the Chinese market. At least in the US market, the PCIe card boasts 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP4, 96GB of LPDDR7, and 1.6TB/s of memory bandwidth.
[9]
Under current US performance caps, the chip would need to be cut down considerably — far more than the 30-50 percent Trump has suggested. By our estimates the chip would be limited to 581 teraFLOPS of FP4 and about 1.4TB/s of memory bandwidth.
While this would give the chip an edge over the H20 in lower precision workloads, at FP8 and or BF16 precision, floating point performance would be nearly identical. However, even the US-spec RTX Pro 6000 falls behind the H20's 4TB/s of memory bandwidth, which is arguably the more important spec for large scale model serving.
Because of this, Huang may attempt to convince Trump to raise the performance caps or grant another exception to allow the sale of a cut down version of more powerful B200 accelerators.
Such a chip would be better positioned to compete with Huawei's CloudMatrix [10]rack systems which already outperform the H20 in several metrics.
However, growing national security concerns over the potential inclusion of backdoors or remote kill switches on US-made chips could end up spooking Chinese buyers.
While Nvidia has denied the inclusion of any such backdoors, kill switches, or spyware in its H20 and other chips, several legislators in the US have been [11]pushing for location tracking functionality in a bid to crack down on gray and black market market chips.
[12]Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan to visit White House after Trump calls for him to step down
[13]A billion dollars' worth of Nvidia chips fell off a truck and found their way to China, report says
[14]Nvidia security boss pledges 'no backdoors'
[15]Chained bugs in Nvidia's Triton Inference Server lead to full system compromise
Over the weekend, Chinese state media [16]painted Nvidia's H20 accelerators as unsophisticated, unsafe, and environmentally unfriendly.
While we don't know what it'll cost Nvidia to get its Blackwell parts into China, the Trump administration is already [17]facing backlash from the President's Republican colleagues for lifting the H20 restrictions.
In late July, Representative John Moolenaar (R-MI), who chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP, penned a [18]letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, demanding an explanation for the decision and warning that the chips could be used to build supercomputers in violation of US end-use rules. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-11/trump-open-to-nvidia-selling-scaled-back-blackwell-chip-to-china
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/amd_china_chips/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/nvidia_amd_china_export_tax
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/05/28/nvidia_us_chipmakers_ai_requirements_china/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/huawei_rackscale_boogeyman/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/15/gpu_tracking_house/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/intel_chief_to_visit_white/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/24/nvidia_chips_china_whoops/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/ai_chips_to_china_charges/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/05/nvidia_triton_bug_chain/
[16] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-state-media-says-nvidia-h20-chips-not-safe-china-2025-08-10/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/trump_gpu_china/
[18] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/press-releases/moolenaar-warns-against-undermining-us-ai-advantage-in-nvidia-china-review-calls-on-commerce-to-maintain-strong-guardrails-amid-national-security-concerns
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Speaking to the press on Monday, US President Donald Trump suggested he'd be willing to entertain a deal to allow shipments of an "enhanced" version of Nvidia's Blackwell chips. "In other words, take 30 percent to 50 percent off of it," Trump said, according to [1]Bloomberg .
As we previously [2]disclosed , AMD has reportedly entered into a similar arrangement regarding shipments of its own China-spec part, the MI308. In April, the Trump administration briefly blocked sales of the cards after it issued new restrictions on the export of high-end AI accelerators to China.
[3]
The Trump admin lifted those restrictions in July, granting Nvidia and AMD export licenses allowing them to resume sales to Chinese customers. However, as we reported earlier this week, those licenses [4]didn't come cheap .
[5]
[6]
During the press conference, Trump confirmed that he'd hammered out a deal with Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang to allow sales of its H20 GPUs in exchange for a 15 percent share of the revenues. By our estimates, the US government will be raking in somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 million a quarter or or more.
You can bet that any deal to allow shipments of Blackwell accelerators will almost certainly mean additional kickbacks for Uncle Sam.
[7]
While Nvidia has teased a new Blackwell-based part for the Chinese market, details remain limited. Nvidia declined to comment on future Blackwell chips, but emphasized the importance of maintaining US leadership in the emerging AI infrastructure market.
"We follow rules the U.S. government sets for our participation in worldwide markets. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide. America cannot repeat 5G and lose telecommunication leadership. America's AI tech stack can be the world's standard if we race," a company spokesperson said.
Previous reports have [8]suggested that Nvidia may offer a cut down version of its RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell accelerators, announced back at GTC in March, for the Chinese market. At least in the US market, the PCIe card boasts 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP4, 96GB of LPDDR7, and 1.6TB/s of memory bandwidth.
[9]
Under current US performance caps, the chip would need to be cut down considerably — far more than the 30-50 percent Trump has suggested. By our estimates the chip would be limited to 581 teraFLOPS of FP4 and about 1.4TB/s of memory bandwidth.
While this would give the chip an edge over the H20 in lower precision workloads, at FP8 and or BF16 precision, floating point performance would be nearly identical. However, even the US-spec RTX Pro 6000 falls behind the H20's 4TB/s of memory bandwidth, which is arguably the more important spec for large scale model serving.
Because of this, Huang may attempt to convince Trump to raise the performance caps or grant another exception to allow the sale of a cut down version of more powerful B200 accelerators.
Such a chip would be better positioned to compete with Huawei's CloudMatrix [10]rack systems which already outperform the H20 in several metrics.
However, growing national security concerns over the potential inclusion of backdoors or remote kill switches on US-made chips could end up spooking Chinese buyers.
While Nvidia has denied the inclusion of any such backdoors, kill switches, or spyware in its H20 and other chips, several legislators in the US have been [11]pushing for location tracking functionality in a bid to crack down on gray and black market market chips.
[12]Intel chief Lip-Bu Tan to visit White House after Trump calls for him to step down
[13]A billion dollars' worth of Nvidia chips fell off a truck and found their way to China, report says
[14]Nvidia security boss pledges 'no backdoors'
[15]Chained bugs in Nvidia's Triton Inference Server lead to full system compromise
Over the weekend, Chinese state media [16]painted Nvidia's H20 accelerators as unsophisticated, unsafe, and environmentally unfriendly.
While we don't know what it'll cost Nvidia to get its Blackwell parts into China, the Trump administration is already [17]facing backlash from the President's Republican colleagues for lifting the H20 restrictions.
In late July, Representative John Moolenaar (R-MI), who chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP, penned a [18]letter to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, demanding an explanation for the decision and warning that the chips could be used to build supercomputers in violation of US end-use rules. ®
Get our [19]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-11/trump-open-to-nvidia-selling-scaled-back-blackwell-chip-to-china
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/amd_china_chips/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/nvidia_amd_china_export_tax
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/05/28/nvidia_us_chipmakers_ai_requirements_china/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aJpn94c6XxRy2hSBY0t7RwAAAME&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/huawei_rackscale_boogeyman/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/15/gpu_tracking_house/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/11/intel_chief_to_visit_white/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/24/nvidia_chips_china_whoops/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/06/ai_chips_to_china_charges/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/05/nvidia_triton_bug_chain/
[16] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-state-media-says-nvidia-h20-chips-not-safe-china-2025-08-10/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/trump_gpu_china/
[18] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/press-releases/moolenaar-warns-against-undermining-us-ai-advantage-in-nvidia-china-review-calls-on-commerce-to-maintain-strong-guardrails-amid-national-security-concerns
[19] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
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