Trump Eyes Nvidia Blackwell China Sales, Seeks Revenue Share
The Trump administration is reportedly considering a deal that would permit the sale of restricted versions of Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) to China. This potential agreement follows a similar arrangement for Nvidia’s H20 AI accelerators and AMD’s MI308 chips, highlighting a complex interplay between national security, technological leadership, and economic interests.
Previously, the Trump administration had temporarily blocked sales of high-end AI accelerators to China, only to lift those restrictions in July, granting export licenses to both Nvidia and AMD. These licenses, however, came at a significant cost. President Trump recently confirmed that a deal was struck with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, allowing H20 GPU sales in exchange for a 15 percent share of the revenue for the US government. Based on current estimates, this could translate to a quarterly income of $900 million or more for the US. Any future agreement concerning Blackwell accelerators would almost certainly entail a similar financial arrangement.
While Nvidia has hinted at a new Blackwell-based product for the Chinese market, specific details remain scarce. The company declined to comment on future Blackwell chips but emphasized the critical importance of maintaining US leadership in the burgeoning AI infrastructure sector. A company spokesperson stated that Nvidia adheres to US government regulations for its global market participation, expressing hope that export control rules will enable American companies to compete effectively worldwide. The spokesperson underscored the necessity of avoiding a repeat of the 5G scenario, where the US lost telecommunications leadership, and stressed that America’s AI technology stack could become the global standard if the nation continues to innovate rapidly.
Industry reports suggest that Nvidia might offer a pared-down version of its RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell accelerators, initially unveiled at the GTC conference in March, for the Chinese market. The standard US-market PCIe card boasts impressive specifications, including 4 petaFLOPS of sparse FP4 performance, 96GB of LPDDR7 memory, and 1.6 terabytes per second (TB/s) of memory bandwidth. However, to comply with current US performance caps, a China-bound version of this chip would need substantial modifications—far more than the 30 to 50 percent reduction President Trump alluded to. Estimates suggest such a chip would be limited to approximately 581 teraFLOPS of FP4 and about 1.4 TB/s of memory bandwidth.
While this restricted Blackwell chip might offer an advantage over the H20 in certain lower-precision workloads, its floating-point performance at FP8 or BF16 precision would be nearly identical. Crucially, even the US-spec RTX Pro 6000 falls short of the H20’s 4 TB/s of memory bandwidth, a specification widely considered more vital for deploying large-scale AI models. This disparity might prompt Jensen Huang to advocate for higher performance caps or seek further exceptions to allow the sale of a less constrained version of the more powerful B200 accelerators, which would be better positioned to compete with Huawei’s CloudMatrix rack systems that already surpass the H20 in several performance metrics.
The situation is further complicated by growing national security concerns among Chinese buyers regarding the potential inclusion of backdoors or remote kill switches in US-made chips. Although Nvidia has consistently denied incorporating any such features in its H20 or other products, several US legislators have been actively pushing for location-tracking functionalities in chips to curb gray and black market sales. Simultaneously, Chinese state media has recently criticized Nvidia’s H20 accelerators, labeling them as unsophisticated, unsafe, and environmentally unfriendly.
The Trump administration’s decision to lift the H20 restrictions has already drawn criticism from within his own Republican party. In late July, Representative John Moolenaar (R-MI), who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, demanding an explanation for the decision and warning that the chips could be used to construct supercomputers in violation of US end-use regulations. The path forward for Nvidia’s Blackwell chips in China remains a complex negotiation, balancing strategic competition, economic gain, and national security.