America's finance chief Bessent says China can have Blackwell chips once they're outdated
Trump’s announcement briefly lifted Nvidia’s share price, but the company’s prospects in China now potentially rest on decisions in Beijing as much as in Washington. The Financial Times reports that Chinese regulators have been discussing ways to allow only limited access to H200 — including an approval process where buyers must explain why domestic chips cannot meet their needs — and could bar the public sector from purchasing Nvidia hardware altogether. At the time of writing, no official confirmation of this has been released by the Chinese government.
The provisional opening nonetheless matters to China’s largest cloud providers. Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance have adopted domestic accelerators for some inference workloads but continue to prefer Nvidia products for training and maintaining large models, often sending jobs overseas where access to H100-class compute remains unrestricted. If allowed, H200 purchases would ease those workarounds, though companies would still have to navigate both governments’ approval systems.
Following the announcement, a group of senators described the move as a "colossal economic and national security failure", arguing that H200’s performance would give Chinese AI firms a meaningful lift. The bipartisan "SAFE CHIPS Act" introduced last week seeks to prevent the administration from approving exports of advanced chips, including H200, for 30 months.
The announcement also coincided with the Justice Department’s announcement of "Operation Gatekeeper", which alleges a smuggling network routed Nvidia parts into China and Hong Kong despite existing controls, piling yet more pressure on Washington to create a regulated channel for hardware that continues to leak across borders.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/trump-approves-nvidia-h20-exports-to-china-25percent-fee-applies#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.