NVIDIA and AMD resume AI chip sales to China after May policy reversal
Both vendors confirmed in May that export licenses cleared for the H200 and MI308 — the de-facto China-tier successors to Hopper and MI300. The policy whiplash matters less than the volume implication: a market that lost $15B+ in pent-up demand is reopening.
NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang, accompanying President Trump on his May state visit to Beijing, confirmed what the company has been telegraphing for weeks: the H200 — NVIDIA's China-tier accelerator — is cleared for sale to Chinese customers, and the company has begun re-accepting purchase orders.
AMD has done the same with its MI308, the China-compliant variant of the MI300 family.
For both vendors the policy reversal is the visible event. The market implication underneath it is larger: a buyer base that has been functionally shut out of frontier-grade silicon since 2023 is being reopened in a year when domestic demand is also at record levels.
#What changes
Tactically, two things. First, NVIDIA will recover several quarters of deferred revenue from a customer cohort that has been buying every alternative it could find — domestic accelerators, refurbished A100s, and grey-market H100s — at margins NVIDIA never saw. Second, the company restarts a manufacturing line that had been allocated entirely to Western buyers, which creates near-term competition for TSMC capacity already under strain.
AMD's position is structurally different. The MI308 was designed for this market, and the relicensing arrives at a moment when AMD's overall data-center share is at multi-year highs following its 6 GW Meta deal in February.
#What does not change
The relicensing applies to specific SKUs, not to the wider export-control regime. The most capable accelerators — Blackwell-class NVIDIA parts and AMD's frontier MI450 line — remain restricted. The China policy of 2026 looks less like a thaw and more like a calibration: enough flow to capture revenue, not enough to enable a Chinese-side frontier training run.
How long that calibration holds is the question every chip equity is now pricing.