Trump might approve 50% scaled-down NVIDIA Blackwell for China — still beats all local chips

According to Reuters, the Trump administration has asked NVIDIA and AMD to give the U.S. government 15% of revenue from AI chip sales in China, after approving exports of NVIDIA’s H20 and AMD’s MI308.

Notably, in addition to the H20, Trump said Jensen Huang has a reduced version of NVIDIA’s Blackwell chip—with 30%-50% of its capabilities removed, and likely intended for the Chinese market—and that he is weighing whether to approve its sale. As the report adds, Trump said Huang may meet with him again on the matter and acknowledged that the H20 is already outdated.

Even a 50% cut Blackwell could outpace China’s best
The picture could shift if a scaled-down Blackwell is approved for the Chinese market. According to Tom’s Hardware, even with a 30%–50% performance reduction, NVIDIA’s B100, B200, or B300 GPUs would still provide Chinese users with substantial computing power. Should the Trump administration move forward with the proposal to cap performance of even the lowest-end data center-grade Blackwell by 50%, both AMD and NVIDIA could still supply China with far faster chips, the report notes.

Tom’s Hardware adds that China’s top option right now, NVIDIA’s H20 HGX GPU, delivers 148 FP16/BF16 TFLOPS and 296 FP8 TFLOPS for AI training and inference. By comparison, a hypothetical B100 with a 50% performance cut would still provide 900 FP16/BF16 TFLOPS, 1.75 FP8 PFLOPS, and 3.5 FP4 PFLOPS. As the report notes, no Chinese-made AI accelerator currently comes close to this level of performance.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg notes that a newer, more capable product could boost NVIDIA’s standing with Chinese customers—if it secures administration approval. The report says both NVIDIA and AMD have seen China revenues hit by tighter U.S. export controls on AI chips. While the Trump administration has begun granting licenses for certain chips, these are older models comparable to domestic Chinese products, casting doubt on their market appeal.

In April, when the U.S. tightened restrictions, NVIDIA said it would develop another chip for the Chinese market and seek export approval, as noted by Bloomberg. The company also said the older Hopper architecture—basis of the China-only H20—could no longer be further scaled back, Bloomberg adds.

Source: TrendForce, Taiwan.