- White House allows Nvidia H200 exports to China with 25% fee
- US officials evaluated strategies ranging from complete export bans to market flooding
- President Trump says H200 exports support American jobs and manufacturing efforts
The White House has approved the export of Nvidia H200 AI accelerators to China with a fee of 25% per shipment.
According to reports, the decision was influenced by Huawei’s rapid development of its Ascend 910C chips, particularly the CloudMatrix 384 system, which integrates 384 of these accelerators.
Internal sources suggest that the US move is aimed at maintaining US dominance in the global technology ecosystem while curtailing the country’s proprietary Blackwell and Rubin architectures.
Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 performance
Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 has been described as a “nuclear-level product” capable of delivering 300 petaflops of dense BF16 computing.
It outperforms Nvidia’s GB200 NVL72 system on certain performance metrics, highlighting its raw computing power.
The system also provides 3.6 times more total memory and over twice the memory bandwidth compared to Nvidia’s platform.
However, these gains come at the cost of nearly four times the power consumption, raising concerns about efficiency.
These accelerators have been installed in Huawei’s data centers, where abundant electricity reduces the importance of energy efficiency.
The company plans to scale Ascend 910C production to hundreds of thousands of units next year, with forecasts suggesting millions could be manufactured by 2026.
Despite China’s development of its own AI instruction set through CANN, Nvidia GPUs remain the preferred choice for many AI developers, including companies like Deepseek.
Huawei has made its CANN software for Ascend GPUs open source, offering multi-layered programming interfaces for AI applications.
The move aims to challenge CUDA’s nearly two decades of dominance and encourage a domestic ecosystem that reduces reliance on US hardware.
Early adoption remains uncertain as CANN’s ecosystem is still immature compared to the long-established CUDA platform.
With Huawei’s progress, the US has reportedly gone through several scenarios, from outright export bans to trying to overwhelm Huawei by flooding the market.
The final decision represents a middle ground that balances national security, global AI competitiveness and economic interests.
President Trump emphasized that authorized exports will support American jobs and manufacturing while maintaining leverage over advanced AI technology.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged uncertainty about whether Chinese customers would fully buy H200 systems, noting a $5.5 billion revenue shortfall in AI chips earlier in 2025.
The turnaround therefore appears to be driven by Huawei’s Ascend 910C performance trajectory, which poses a potential threat to US leadership in AI hardware.
While exporting H200 chips allows the US to maintain influence in AI software ecosystems.
It also reflects the recognition of China’s growing capacity in high-performance accelerators.
Via Tom’s hardware
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