Nvidia to Resume H20 AI Chip Sales to China. The Stock Jumps.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. (Photo by I-HWA CHENG/AFP via Getty Images)

Nvidia is back in China.

In a stunning turn of events, the chip maker said it expects to soon be able to sell its H20 AI chip in the country, sending shares sharply higher.

On Monday, Nvidia said the U.S. government has assured the company it will approve its license applications to sell the H20 to China. Nvidia expects to commence deliveries soon.

“NVIDIA is filing applications to sell the NVIDIA H20 GPU again. The U.S. government has assured NVIDIA that licenses will be granted, and NVIDIA hopes to start deliveries soon,” the company’s blog post reads.

Created with Highcharts 9.0.1Nvidia stock priceSource: FactSetAs of July 14, 4 p.m. ET

Created with Highcharts 9.0.12025July90100110120130140150160$170

In April, the administration effectively banned Nvidia from selling H20 chips to China by tightening chip export licensing requirements to the country.

Nvidia stock jumped 4.6% to $171.63 in premarket trading Tuesday, building on the momentum that led it to become the first company ever to close with a market value of more than $4 trillion last week. Nasdaq and S&P 500 futures were up 0.5% and 0.3%.

In May, CEO Jensen Huang said the decision to effectively ban sales of the company’s H20 had a negative revenue impact of $10.5 billion in total across Nvidia’s April and July quarters.

Huang has argued that limiting access to his company’s products forces companies to provide financial resources to China’s Huawei, which the rival will then use for R&D to compete with Nvidia.

“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 has said. “If we don’t compete in China, and we allow the Chinese ecosystem to build a rich ecosystem because we’re not there to compete for it, and new platforms are developed and they’re not American at a time when the world is diffusing AI technology, their leadership and their technology will diffuse all around the world.”

Last week, Huang met with President Donald Trump. It seems the meeting went well.

The news that Meta Platforms will build several big data centers to power its artificial intelligence push is another positive for Nvidia as that likely includes purchases of Nvidia chips.

“We’re calling the first one Prometheus and it’s coming online in ’26,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his social platform Threads on Monday, referring to an Ohio facility. “We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well,” Zuckerberg added.

As of Monday’s close, shares of Nvidia are up 22% this year after being down as much as 30% earlier in April.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com and Elsa Ohlen at elsa.ohlen@barrons.com