The US government has decided not to impose sanctions on AI chip designer NVIDIA, saving the company’s high-end H20 GPUs from being targeted by new rules aimed at restricting sales to China.
The move comes after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek demonstrated comparable performance to Western products using fewer resources, causing a significant selloff in January 2025. The US government had reportedly been considering sanctions on NVIDIA’s China-specific H20 GPUs, which are the most technologically advanced product that can be sold to China.
NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang met with President Trump last week and allegedly made promises of new investments in US AI data centers, which may have contributed to the administration’s decision. The company’s shares have risen 5.9% after losing 7.6% since Trump announced tariffs on Chinese imports.
The White House declined comment, while NVIDIA refused to discuss the matter. However, sources suggest that the H20 GPUs were in high demand in China and had been causing shortages. DeepSeek used the chips to train its AI models, relying on a deeper-level programming language than NVIDIA’s standard CUDA.
NVIDIA’s H20 GPUs are considered the most advanced AI product available to Chinese firms, with domestic companies like Huawei and SMIC struggling to match Western and Taiwanese chip design and manufacturing capabilities.
Source: https://wccftech.com/nvidias-china-h20-ai-gpus-spared-by-trump-admin-in-return-for-us-ai-data-center-investments-report