The Trump Administration has opted not to place additional restrictions on the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China following CEO Jensen Huang’s attendance at a Mar-a-Lago dinner last week.

According to a report from NPR, the controls were due to be implemented this week but have been scrapped after Nvidia promised the Trump administration it would invest in AI data centers in the US, although the report notes it's unclear if Huang spoke directly to the President.

First announced in 2023, Nvidia’s H20 GPUs are a less sophisticated version of its H100 processors and were designed specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with US export controls.

Reuters first reported that the Trump Administration was considering tightening restrictions on H20s in January 2025. The following month, the news outlet reported that orders for the H20 chips had “surged” following demand for DeepSeek’s AI models, with Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance all “significantly increased” their orders of the chip – a report from April puts the combined total at around $16 billion for the first three months of the year.

Speaking to DCD in 2018, Huang said China represented about a third of the company’s business, but this figure has now dropped to around 13 percent of the company’s total revenue.

President Trump has yet to impose tariffs on semiconductors manufactured outside the US but has been threatening them since the start of the year, telling reporters in February: “It’ll be 25 percent and higher, and it’ll go very substantially higher over the course of a year.”

However, a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports has been enacted, which is likely to impact data center operators' ability to construct data centers, AI or otherwise.