Nvidia has ordered 300,000 of its H20 chips from Taiwan’s TSMC, just a week after the U.S. government allowed the company to resume sales of these chips to China. This move suggests Nvidia is seeing strong demand from Chinese buyers and is no longer relying only on its existing stockpile of 600,000–700,000 chips.
Earlier this year, in April, the Trump administration had blocked Nvidia from selling H20 chips to China due to national security concerns. However, the decision was reversed this month during ongoing talks between the U.S. and China over rare earth magnet exports—materials China dominates and the U.S. heavily depends on.
Industry research firm SemiAnalysis reported that Nvidia has already sold around 1 million H20 chips in 2024. CEO Jensen Huang also visited Beijing recently and said that new orders would influence whether the company restarts chip production. However, restarting production could take about nine months.
Despite the new order to TSMC, Nvidia has reportedly told customers that it still has limited supply of H20 chips and no immediate plans to restart full-scale manufacturing. The U.S. Commerce Department still hasn’t approved all the export licenses required for Nvidia to ship more chips, even though Nvidia said in mid-July that it expected approval soon.
Before the April ban, Chinese tech companies like Tencent, ByteDance, and Alibaba had significantly increased their orders of the H20 chip. Nvidia’s CEO also said on a podcast that the company may have missed out on $15 billion in sales because of the earlier restrictions.
Neither Nvidia, TSMC, nor the Commerce Department gave any official comment on the situation.
Be First to Comment