At least $1 billion worth of Nvidia’s advanced artificial intelligence processors were shipped to China in the three months after Donald Trump tightened chip export controls, exposing the limits of Washington’s efforts to restrain Beijing’s high-tech ambitions.
A Financial Times analysis of dozens of sales contracts, company filings, and multiple people with direct knowledge of the deals reveals that Nvidia’s B200 has become the most sought-after—and widely available—chip in a rampant Chinese black market for American semiconductors.
The processor is widely used by US powerhouses such as OpenAI, Google, and Meta to train their latest AI systems, but banned for sale to China.
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On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a partnership with Oracle to develop 4.5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity for its Stargate AI infrastructure platform in the US. The expansion, which TechCrunch reports is part of a $30 billion-per-year deal between OpenAI and Oracle, will reportedly bring OpenAI's total Stargate capacity under development to over 5 gigawatts.
The data center has taken root in Abilene, Texas, a city of 127,000 located 150 miles west of Fort Worth. The city, which serves as the commercial hub of a 19-county region known as the "Big Country," offers a location with existing tech employment ecosystem, including Dyess Air Force Base and three universities. Abilene's economy has evolved over time from its agricultural and livestock roots to embrace technology and manufacturing sectors.
"We have signed a deal for an additional 4.5 gigawatts of capacity with oracle as part of stargate. easy to throw around numbers, but this is a gigantic infrastructure project," wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X. "We are planning to significantly expand the ambitions of stargate past the $500 billion commitment we announced in January."
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The Trump White House says it's content to allow Nvidia to tap into the lucrative Chinese market.
"We don't sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best," Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CNBC Tuesday afternoon. "I think fourth best is where we have come out that we're cool."
Nvidia announced on Monday that the Trump administration has signaled it will allow the company to sell its China-specific H20 chip once more. The news sent shares of the world's most valuable company, which eclipsed $4 trillion in market cap last week, even higher.
Nvidia's H20 was designed to be technologically inferior. As Lutnick said, the company also sells three other chips that far surpass the H20's power. Nvidia is already preparing its transition from Blackwell (its most powerful chip) to Blackwell Ultra and has plans for its next superchip, "Vera Rubin."
CEO Jensen Huang has pushed to sell the company's prized chips to China. Before the news, Nvidia said it had lost $8 billion on unshipped orders. The announcement came after Huang met with President Donald Trump at the White House last week.
Lutnick said that the administration shares Huang's view that cutting China off completely from the chips needed to power artificial intelligence advancements won't starve China's AI industry.
"So the idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own, right? So you want to keep one step ahead of what they can build so they keep buying our chips, because, remember, developers are the key to technology," Lutnick said.
In the end, Lutnick said, it's better if China becomes reliant on the US for chips.
"So you want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack," he said. And that's the thinking. Donald Trump is on it."
Chinese firms have begun rushing to order Nvidia's H20 AI chips as the company plans to resume sales to mainland China, Reuters reports. The chip giant expects to receive US government licenses soon so that it can restart shipments of the restricted processors just days after CEO Jensen Huang met with President Donald Trump, potentially generating $15 billion to $20 billion in additional revenue this year.
Nvidia said in a statement that it is filing applications with the US government to resume H20 sales and that "the US government has assured Nvidia that licenses will be granted, and Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon."
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, Nvidia's financial trajectory has been linked to the demand for specialized hardware capable of executing AI models with maximum efficiency. Nvidia designed its data center GPU to perform the massive parallel computations required by neural networks, processing countless matrix operations simultaneously.
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Nvidia is recommending a mitigation for customers of one of its GPU product lines that will degrade performance by up to 10 percent in a bid to protect users from exploits that could let hackers sabotage work projects and possibly cause other compromises.
The move comes in response to an attack a team of academic researchers demonstrated against Nvidia’s RTX A6000, a widely used GPU for high-performance computing that’s available from many cloud services. A vulnerability the researchers discovered opens the GPU to Rowhammer, a class of attack that exploits physical weakness in DRAM chip modules that store data.
Rowhammer allows hackers to change or corrupt data stored in memory by rapidly and repeatedly accessing—or hammering—a physical row of memory cells. By repeatedly hammering carefully chosen rows, the attack induces bit flips in nearby rows, meaning a digital zero is converted to a one or vice versa. Until now, Rowhammer attacks have been demonstrated only against memory chips for CPUs, used for general computing tasks.
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On Wednesday, Nvidia became the first company in history to reach $4 trillion market valuation as shares rose more than 2 percent, reports CNBC. The GPU maker's stock has climbed 22 percent since the start of 2025, continuing a trend driven by demand for AI hardware following ChatGPT's late 2022 launch.
The milestone marks the highest market cap ever recorded for a publicly traded company, surpassing Apple's previous record of $3.8 trillion set in December. Nvidia first crossed $2 trillion in February 2024 and reached $3 trillion just four months later in June. The $4 trillion valuation represents a market capitalization larger than the GDP of most countries.
As we explained in 2023, Nvidia's continued success has been intimately tied to growth in demand for hardware that runs AI models as capably and efficiently as possible. The company's data center GPUs excel at performing billions of matrix multiplications necessary to train and run neural networks due to their parallel architecture—hardware architectures that originated as video game graphics accelerators now power the generative AI boom.
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You might hear people mentioning Nvidia more this week. The stock is trading at an all-time high. It's officially the most valuable company in the world. But are people pronouncing it correctly?
Despite the company dominating headlines and being at the forefront of many conversations around AI, some people still don't know how to pronounce its name.
Luckily, Nvidia cleared the confusion on its website and explained the proper pronunciation. We're sorry to tell you, but if you're one of the people calling the tech giant "NUH-vid-ee-uh," you've been saying it wrong.
The proper pronunciation of Nvidia is "en-VID-ee-uh," according to the company.
Nvidia
Founded by CEO Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem in 1993, the chipmaker's name actually came from its lack of a name, Fortune previously reported. While the trio focused on developing the company, they put its title on the back burner and named files "NV" as an abbreviation for the "next version."
The three eventually decided on NVision before realizing the name was taken by a toilet-paper manufacturing company, The New Yorker reported. Finally, Huang suggested the chipmaker's current name, a spinoff of the word "invidia," which means envy in Latin, the report said.
Robert Galbraith/Reuters
Huang and the founders had dreams of creating a product that would make rivals "green with envy," Nvidia cofounder Priem said. Given Nvidia has a nearly $3.9 trillion market cap and a long line of tech giants and startups angling for its latest AI chips, it seems as if that vision has come to fruition.
To celebrate Nvidia's stock price hitting $100 years ago, Huang got the company's logo tattooed on his arm — an experience he later said "hurts way more than anybody tells you."
Check out the video below to hear Huang pronounce the name at Nvidia's 2024 keynote.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said that programming AI is similar to "the way you program a person" — and that "human" is the new coders' language.
"The thing that's really, really quite amazing is the way you program an AI is like the way you program a person," Huang told London Tech Week on Monday.
Huang shared an example, saying, "You say, 'You are an incredible poet. You are deeply steeped in Shakespeare, and I would like you to write a poem to describe today's keynote.' Without very much effort, this AI would help you generate such a wonderful poem.
"And when it answers, you could say, 'I feel like you could do even better.' And it will go off and think about it and it will come back and say, 'In fact, I can do better.' And it does do a better job."
Huang said that in the past, "technology was hard to use" and that to access computer science, "we had to learn programming languages, architect systems, and design very complicated computers.
"But now, all of a sudden, there's a new programming language. This new programming language is called human."
"Most people don't know C++, very few people know Python, and everybody, as you know, knows human."
Huang called AI "the great equalizer" for making technology accessible to everyone and called the shift "transformative.
"This way of interacting with computers, I think, is something that almost anybody can do," he said.
"The way you program a computer today is to ask the computer to do something for you, even write a program, generate images, write a poem — just ask it nicely," Huang added.
At the World Government Summit in Dubai last year, Huang suggested the tech sector should focus less on coding and more on using AI as a tool across fields like farming, biology, and education.
"It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human, everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence," Huang said at the time.
When it comes to Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5060 graphics card, the GPU itself is less interesting than the storm Nvidia stirred up by trying to earn it better reviews. If you don’t follow the twists and turns of graphics card launch metanarratives, allow me to recap the company's behavior for you.
Though the RTX 5060 launched on May 19, Nvidia and its partners were uncharacteristically slow to ship graphics cards to reviewers. For outlets that received pre-launch hardware, Nvidia didn’t provide the pre-launch drivers that it usually sends out so that reviewers could run their own tests on the cards, informing reviewers on a call that drivers would be available to them and the public on the 19th.
Except! Nvidia did offer advance drivers to a handful of publications on the condition that they run a few benchmarks that had been pre-selected by Nvidia and that they only report numbers from tests performed with the 50-series new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) setting enabled.
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