Nvidia celebrated its return to China. A Trump official threw cold water on it

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Tuesday that Nvidia will only offer China its “fourth best” AI chips, after the Trump administration reversed course to let the tech giant sell its chips again to China. 

“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Lutnick said in an interview on CNBC. “The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it. … We want to keep having the Chinese use the American technology stack, because they still rely upon it.”

Lutnick said China is “more than capable of building their own” but the U.S. wants to “keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips. … You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack. … That’s the thinking.”

The vast majority of China’s most advanced AI data centers — including close to 40 recently announced projects that will be loaded with more than 115,000 high-end Nvidia GPUs — still rely on Nvidia chips, often stockpiled through intermediaries or legacy contracts.

Lutnick's comments came a day after Nvidia announced its return to China. 

Nvidia said in a company blog post on Monday that it has received assurances from the Trump administration that Commerce Department licenses for the company’s H20 AI chip will be granted, allowing the $4 trillion powerhouse to restart deliveries to China. That announcement came just days after Huang reportedly made Nvidia's case directly to President Donald Trump and Lutnick.

The H20 was supposed to be Nvidia’s big workaround for restrictions on sales of powerful AI hardware to China. When the U.S. tightened export rules last year, Nvidia responded by launching the chip, a lower-spec version of its flagship GPU designed to fall just under those limits. But in April, the Commerce Department blocked the H20 anyway, leaving Nvidia with billions in stranded inventory and Chinese customers in limbo. 

Now, the U.S. has reversed course — at least partially. Nvidia says it hopes to begin H20 shipments to China “soon.”

Alongside the H20, Nvidia is also introducing a “China-compliant” chip: the RTX Pro, a lower-performance model designed for industrial and logistics applications that Huang said “is ideal for digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics.” The new chip meets U.S. export rules and was cleared without controversy. The RTX Pro should give Nvidia a legal and diplomatic safety valve, keeping one foot in the Chinese market even if future restrictions tighten (again).

—Shannon Carroll contributed to this article.