Nvidia sheds gains after FT reports that China may limit access to H200 chips despite Trump’s announcement yesterday

There’s no easy fix to Nvidia’s China problem.

The world’s most valuable publicly traded company had extended Monday’s gains during after-hours trading yesterday on the heels of US President Donald Trump’s Truth Social post indicating that the chip designer could begin to sell its H200 chips to China, with 25% of the proceeds going to the US government.

However, the company is reversing those gains this morning, with Nvidia dipping into the red relative to yesterday’s close at its lows, after the Financial Times reported that “regulators in Beijing have been discussing ways to permit limited access to the H200,” according to two people familiar with the matter.

Per the FT, buyers would likely need to go through a lengthy approvals process to get their hands on the H200s — Nvidia’s most advanced chip in its Hopper line, which has since been replaced by the Blackwell generation — and would need to provide an explanation as to why domestic Chinese chips couldn’t perform the tasks at hand.

This feels like déjà vu all over again for Nvidia.

Export restrictions put in place in mid-April during the height of US-China trade tensions prevented the chip designer from sending its H20 chip, a nerfed version of its premium Hopper offering, to China. After that export ban was lifted months later, demand from China “never materialized,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said following the company’s Q3 earnings report. Reports suggested that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them toward domestic alternatives.

The difference between the H20 and the H200 is one zero (and a lot of computing power). Zero is also the amount of interest that Chinese policymakers would prefer their leading tech companies to have in Nvidia’s chips.

China’s seemingly measured response to its renewed ability to access these chips suggests that the heady thoughts of a $10 billion to $15 billion boost to Nvidia revenues, which Bloomberg Intelligence analysts had anticipated following Monday’s announcement, may need to be tempered.

A bipartisan group of senators doesn’t want China to have access to advanced US chips. Chinese leadership seemingly doesn’t want their tech champions to rely on them. President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, on the other hand, don’t mind if they do.