Chinese Worry Nvidia H20 Chips Are Poisoned Wine For AI Industry

2025-07-18 08:09:20

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The relaxation of the United States' export controls for Nvidia's H20 chips won brief applause in China – while raising longer-term concerns about whether Chinese firms will over-rely on foreign artificial intelligence chips.

During a trip to China on July 15, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang said in a press conference that the company will resume H20 chip sales to China, now that the US government has indicated it will soon grant export licenses.

“I hope to get more advanced chips into China than the H20,” Huang said.“Technology is always moving on. Today, Hopper's terrific, but some years from now, we will have more and more and better and better technology, and I think it's sensible that whatever we're allowed to sell in China will continue to get better and better over time as well,” he said.

He also took the opportunity to praise Huawei's achievements in making AI chips.

However, some Chinese commentators viewed the development as unfavorable for China's chip-making sector.

“This is not a simple lifting of the export restrictions, but a carefully designed measure for the United States to maintain its technological blockade against China,” a Guangdong-based columnist says in an article.

“The H20's FP16 computing power is only 15% of H100, while its NVLink bandwidth is reduced from 900GB/s to 400GB/s. The chip's transformer engine (TE) is completely deleted,” he says.“Such a design ensures the chip's AI inference ability and reduces its AI training capability, perfectly implementing the United States' strategy of blocking high-end chips, but not mid-end ones, to China.”

“By limiting the key performance of H20, the US can maintain its blockade of high-end computing power while handing Chinese companies a glass of 'poisoned wine,'” he says.

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