China banned Nvidia 5090D V2 while CEO Jensen Huang was in town, report claims — move comes as Beijing pushes its AI tech companies to use homegrown chips (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/world@lemmy.world

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China reportedly banned Nvidia's RTX 5090D V2, an export-friendly version of its top-end RTX 5090 GPU, while CEO Jensen Huang was visiting the country as part of President Donald Trump's state visit last week, the Financial Times reports. The report claims the chip has been added to a list of banned goods at Chinese customs. Huang was a late addition to Trump’s entourage last week, boarding Air Force One in Alaska after he was initially not included on the President’s guest list.

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The Nvidia RTX 5090D V2 is a version of the company’s top-of-the-line gaming GPU designed to comply with U.S. export controls. This graphics card, which has less VRAM and lower bandwidth compared to the vanilla 5090, is designed for Chinese gamers and 3D artists. However, AI developers have also been taking advantage of this relatively powerful GPU, especially as they’ve been cut off from Nvidia’s more potent Blackwell-powered AI GPUs.

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Full article here, clicky linky.

So basically, China banned an Nvidia GPU that while yes is technically designed for 'gamers', is also widely used as a kind of budget alternative to the higher end Nvidia GPUs geared explicitly toward AI/LLM compute and training.

China did this while Huang was in the country, as part of the Trump visit delegation.

Huang is on the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology of the Trump administration.

(source)

This arguably represents a significant setback for Nvidia, who would really like to have as much physical market presence in China as possible, and the Trump admin's 'AI policy goals', simultaneously.

It also could be taken to indicate that China is quite confident in its approach of producing largely open source LLM models via its own homegrown domestic industry of chips geared toward its own methods of LLM training and operation.

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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

Seems more like China trying to prevent growing their existent reliance on Nvidia, even with a watered down card.

Deepseek was big but they basically made a hacked Nvidia driver allowing them to use NVLink, which Nvidia had software banned similar to this export GPU.

I don't think China has the domestic production to fill the gap yet, but they don't want everyone vendor locked so they're willing to give up faster compute for a while if it means their businesses will use something local.

[-] Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Seems more like China trying to prevent growing their existent reliance on Nvidia

Absolutely.

I don’t think China has the domestic production to fill the gap yet,

This is a relatively low end solution for AI, and yes China does have domestic production that can be used instead of those.
The higher end that are not allowed to be exported to China however, are more of a problem, and Chinese companies have to import those through unofficial channels. And those are NOT banned by China. Those are the ones typically used for training an AI.

this post was submitted on 22 May 2026

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