On Tuesday, NVIDIA announced a sales resumption of its H20 AI chip customized for the Chinese market, alongside the launch of a new RTX Pro GPU designed for smart factories and logistics applications.
The next day, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang delivered a speech at the third China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing. This marked his first time addressing the expo in Chinese, where he described NVIDIA’s growth journey, the future of AI, and China’s crucial role in the global supply chain and AI ecosystem.
Why it matters: This is Jensen Huang’s third visit to China this year. He arrived in Beijing ahead of schedule and posted a photo with Xiaomi founder Lei Jun on social media. Export of NVIDIA’s H20 AI chip to China was banned by the US government in April, making the recent approval to resume H20 sales a significant policy shift expected to help NVIDIA regain momentum in China’s AI infrastructure market.
Details: Huang spoke to the Supply China Expo in a traditional Chinese Tang suit and began his speech in Chinese. Over the next decade, we will see AI robots that can really understand the physical world, and they will completely change how factories work, Huang said.
- More than 1.5 million developers in China are building on NVIDIA’s platform and turning their innovations into reality, according to Huang’s speech. World-class open-source models such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent Hunyuan, MiniMax and Baidu Ernie Bot, developed and shared by China, are accelerating the global development of AI, he said.
- China’s open-source AI is accelerating global progress because it lets countries and industries worldwide take part in the AI revolution, Huang said in the speech. Open collaboration also helps ensure AI safety, advance technical standards, build performance benchmarks and improve security measures internationally, he added.
- During the Supply Chain Expo, Huang told a Yicai reporter that many orders for the H20 chip had already been placed, and some companies that had pre-ordered were already waiting for delivery.
Context: In late 2023, NVIDIA developed the H20 AI chip specifically for the Chinese market after the US government tightened export restrictions on high-performance GPUs such as the A100 and H100. The H20 was introduced as a downgraded but still powerful alternative, designed to comply with US regulations while serving demand from Chinese cloud service providers and AI firms.
- In April 2024, the US government temporarily blocked the export of the H20, along with similar models, over national security concerns.
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