Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls US ban on H20 AI chip ‘deeply painful’

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Washington’s plan to stymie China’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities by restricting access to its H20 graphics processing units (GPUs) was “deeply uninformed”, as the US semiconductor giant continues to navigate through a deepening tech rivalry between the world’s two largest economies.

In an interview with tech site Stratechery following his keynote at the Computex 2025 trade show in Taipei this week, Huang described the US government’s latest restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 chips – which had been the most advanced ones the firm could sell to China since early 2024 – as “deeply painful,” highlighting the substantial costs for his company and the broader impact on the AI ecosystem in the long run.

“Anybody who thought that one chess move to somehow ban China from H20s would somehow cut off their ability to do AI is deeply uninformed,” Huang told Stratechery founder Ben Thompson.

Huang said the latest ban, which was implemented by the Trump administration, forced Nvidia to write off around US$5.5 billion in inventory, as well as forgo a potential US$15 billon in sales to China’s US$50 billion market. In the long run, it would hurt Nvidia’s AI ecosystem, including the dominance of its CUDA application programming interface, he suggested.

The Nvidia booth at Computex 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan, May 20, 2025. Photo: EPA-EFE

Mainland China represented around 14 per cent of Nvidia’s total revenue in its financial year ended January 26.

Huang also criticised the Biden administration’s now-rescinded AI Diffusion Rule. “If the goal of the diffusion rule is to ensure that America has to lead, the diffusion rule as it was written will exactly cause us to lose our lead,” Huang said.

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