White House U-turn on Nvidia H200 AI accelerator exports down to Huawei's powerful new Ascend chips, report claims — U.S. committed to 'dominance of the American tech stack'

The U.S. can now export Nvidia's H200 AI accelerator to China, with a 25% fee attached. However, following the authorization of the chips, a new report suggests that the decision was made to ensure American tech dominance globally. Reportedly, a major part of the decision is Huawei's recent advancements with its CloudMatrix 384 and Ascend 910C systems, which are on par with both the H200 and Nvidia's GB200 NVL72, a new Bloomberg report suggests.

This decision would enable China to continue to access Nvidia's CUDA-based AI accelerators, as many AI systems still rely on that particular software stack. While China is attempting to standardize an instruction set of its own, the open-source CANN, it has been noted that Nvidia chips are preferable for companies such as Deepseek for training advanced AI models.

According to sources speaking to Bloomberg, multiple scenarios were considered, including flooding the market to "overwhelm" Huawei, to exporting no AI accelerators, which would mark a dramatic shift, if the previously-approved Nvidia H20 (a cut-down H200) were to be affected. Ultimately, the decision rests somewhere in the middle.

China won't get access to Nvidia's latest Blackwell architectures, but it will retain access to the full-fat H200. The White House likely hopes that this move keeps the latest Nvidia chips, while also keeping the country locked into Nvidia's carefully crafted CUDA-shaped moat. "The Trump administration is committed to ensuring the dominance of the American tech stack - without compromising on national security", said White House spokesman Kush Desai, in a statement to Bloomberg.

White House officials are reported to have reviewed the performance of Huawei's AI accelerator ecosystem, in particular, the CloudMatrix 384 system, which utilizes 384 Ascend 910C chips. The CloudMatrix 384 is positioned directly against Nvidia's (export-controlled) GB200 platform, but with obvious tradeoffs in performance and efficiency.

While Bloomberg notes recent rumblings that Huawei is preparing to up its 910C chip production to 600,000 units next year, the report claims U.S. officials concluded "that Huawei would be capable in 2026 of producing a few million of its Ascend 910C accelerators," according to the insider.

The AI race is now bound by pure performance, and the Trump Administration clearly hopes that retaining its architectural advantage by restricting Blackwell will keep Western frontier AI models at the forefront of the industry.

Just last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang commented that he would be uncertain whether or not Chinese companies would even end up purchasing the H200. Huang has long since been a vocal detractor against export controls of AI GPUs, as Nvidia wrote off $5.5 billion in AI chips in April 2025. Whether or not the availability of H200 systems on the Chinese market will be enough to recover the shortfall remains to be seen.

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