Nvidia’s CEO says China is still finalising licence for H200 chip

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By Wen-Yee Lee and Ben Blanchard

TAIPEI, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Thursday he hopes China will allow the U.S. technology giant to sell its powerful H200 artificial intelligence chip in the country and that the licence is being finalised.

Huang arrived in Taipei after a trip to China where he said he visited customers, partners and government officials. 

“The H200, the actual license for H200 is being finalised. And I’m hoping that also the Chinese government would allow Nvidia to sell the H200, so they have to decide. And I’m looking forward to a favourable decision,” he told reporters at Taipei’s downtown Songshan airport.

“I think that H200 is very good for American technology leadership. It’s also very good for the Chinese market. And the customers would very much like to have H200,” he said.

“And so I’m looking forward to a good decision. And so we just have to wait patiently,” he added.

CHINA APPROVES CHIP PURCHASES WITH CONDITIONS

Citing sources, Reuters reported on Wednesday that China has given approval to ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent to purchase more than 400,000 H200 chips in total.

However, the approvals came with conditions which one source said were too restrictive, with customers not yet converting the approvals to purchase orders.

Huang said the company has not received such information and that his understanding was that the Chinese government was still in the process of deciding. He did not elaborate why China was still deciding.

China has not given a reason for not quickly approving the imports of H200 into the country, but Beijing has wanted to balance meeting demands of its AI industry against nurturing its domestic semiconductor industry.

The H200, Nvidia’s second most powerful AI chip, has become a major flashpoint in U.S.-China relations. Despite strong demand from Chinese firms and U.S. approval for exports, Beijing’s hesitation to allow imports has been the main barrier to shipments.

Huang also said China has many strong chip companies and Nvidia needed to compete quite vigorously. 

“The first thing that we need is orders. And we have a supply that supports all of our existing customers,” Huang said when asked how he would manage packaging capacity, which is already constrained, with manufacturing partner TSMC.

“If H200 is approved, we will work with TSMC to schedule and plan the supply and deliver as fast as we can.”

HUANG SIGNALS INTEREST IN OPENAI FUNDING ROUND

Huang said he would love to invest in OpenAI in response to a question about potential further investment in the ChatGPT creator, without confirming the size of its funding.

Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft, are in ​talks to invest up to $60 billion in OpenAI, with the chip titan providing up to $30 billion, ‌The Information reported on Wednesday.

The U.S. chip giant relies heavily on Taiwan’s supply chain, working closely with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, and major contract manufacturers including Foxconn and Wistron.

TSMC is also investing $165 billion in Arizona to build factories to meet growing customer demand there.

“My expectation is that the demand for TSMC wafers and capacity will far exceed the amount of energy available in Taiwan,” Huang said.

“And so I think that’s great for TSMC. TSMC has a global footprint now,” the Taiwan-born CEO said, adding he plans to meet TSMC CEO C.C. Wei and other Taiwanese supply chain partners.

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Anne Marie Roantree, Himani Sarkar, Shri Navaratnam and Louise Heavens)