NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Rejects Calls for Total China Chip Bans
Roughly 600,000 of Nvidia’s high-performance H200 artificial intelligence chips are sitting in Hong Kong warehouses, waiting for customs approval to enter mainland China.
The U.S. government has cleared the exports, but Chinese authorities are withholding mass clearance. The inventory is worth between $20 billion and $30 billion at list prices.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang rejected calls for total export bans on China during an interview with CBS. Wccftech reported that Huang declared America must compete rather than cede markets.
Jensen Huang says Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's push to stop selling AI chips to China is what something I "completely disagree" with. Jensen Huang: "We have to make sure that technology created by America advantages America first. Every country would do that. Every company… pic.twitter.com/Kgx14GucmS”
Huang explicitly disagreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who had urged Washington to halt all shipments of advanced AI processors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. Huang stated that American companies must compete for the world’s market. He maintained that America is about competition and should not cede entire markets.
To back up his position on American technological dominance, Huang revealed that Nvidia’s next-generation architecture, Vera Rubin, is already in volume production. The platform has been shipped to domestic research labs and figures like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. Huang described AI as a five-layer cake, not just the model.
At the same time, mainland Chinese tech giants are facing severe supply bottlenecks for other hardware. Bloomberg reported that Nvidia can fulfill only about 1% of a massive $70 billion order for RTX Pro 5500 workstation GPUs from firms like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent, as Tom’s Hardware noted. Demand has drastically outstripped planned production, with only tens of thousands expected to be delivered over the coming months.
The RTX Pro 5500 has become a focal point because it features 84GB of GDDR7 memory alongside the CUDA cores of the RTX 5090. Unlike restricted enterprise accelerators, it lacks strict export limits, making it a viable target for Chinese firms racing to build advanced AI models. Nvidia has reportedly halted RTX 5090 production to prioritize its enterprise base.
Meanwhile, the 600,000 H200 chips stranded in Hong Kong highlight a growing friction between Washington and Beijing. While the Trump administration permitted H200 sales to approved buyers following trade negotiations, China has erected its own import barriers. Authorities are steering firms toward utilizing Hong Kong data center compute over remote networks rather than allowing physical shipments into the mainland.
These supply chain hurdles and trade policies have rattled financial markets ahead of Nvidia’s upcoming earnings report. TradingKey reported that Nvidia shares closed down 9.26% at $181.60 on November 5 ahead of the November 17 earnings release.
