NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the rapid progress of artificial intelligence in China and announced the company’s return to the Chinese market with new, US-compliant chips during the China International Supply Chain Expo in Beijing.
Speaking at the expo’s opening ceremony, Huang praised Chinese AI models as among the best in the world, citing breakthroughs from companies such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, and Moonshot.
He credited the open-source nature of many Chinese AI models as a key reason for their impact and global adoption.
“China’s open-source AI is a catalyst for global progress, giving every country and industry a chance to join the AI revolution,” Huang said, as reported by CNBC.
Expecting return of the H20 chip to China
After a pause due to US export restrictions earlier this year, NVIDIA now expects to resume sales of its H20 chips in China. Speaking to reporters in Beijing, Huang noted that the US government had assured the company that licenses for these sales would be granted soon.
“H20 was released from its ban, the memory bandwidth is extremely good,” Huang said, per Reuters. “For LLMs and other new models it will be excellent.”
Huang added that there are many order books already in, indicating strong demand from Chinese tech companies. However, each order still requires final approval from the US government.
Announcing the new RTX Pro GPU chip
Alongside the return of the H20, NVIDIA also announced a brand-new chip for Chinese clients: the RTX Pro GPU. Designed for smart factories and robotics, the chip is fully compliant with US regulations.
“Here in China, because there’s so much robotics innovation going on, and so much smart factory work being done here, and the supply chain is so vast, RTX Pro is perfect,” Huang said, as cited by Reuters.
Balancing act between two superpowers
This marks Huang’s third visit to China in 2025, coming just days after meeting with US President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., where they celebrated NVIDIA’s landmark $4 trillion market capitalization.
Huang called AI a “foundational resource” and compared its importance to electricity and water, underscoring the belief that AI will drive the next wave of economic and societal transformation.
“General-purpose, open-source research and foundation models are the backbone of AI innovation,” he told reporters earlier this month in Washington, D.C. “We believe that every civil model should run best on the US technology stack, encouraging nations worldwide to choose America.”
Still, Huang made clear in Beijing that excluding China from the AI conversation is not realistic. In his words, those who “discount Huawei and anyone who discounts China’s manufacturing capability is deeply naive,” as reported by CNBC.
