China blocks NVIDIA's RTX 5090D V2 imports while Jensen Huang was in Beijing

China stopped granting import permits for Nvidia’s RTX 5090D V2 on 15 May, coinciding with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Beijing visit during Donald Trump’s state-visit delegation. The import ban targets a China-only Blackwell-architecture card introduced to comply with US export controls. The 5090D V2 had been marketed for gaming and 3D animation, but Chinese AI buyers used it as a workaround when access to H100, H200, and Blackwell-class data-center lines was constrained. The card retained Blackwell architecture and could be racked at scale for training and inference outside the explicit export-control framework. The ban aligns with a broader Chinese directive to stop acquiring Nvidia processors, citing domestic alternatives from Huawei and Cambricon, alongside chip-design efforts such as Alibaba’s T-Head Zhenwu M890.

"China stopped granting import permits for Nvidia's RTX 5090D V2 gaming card on 15 May, the same week Jensen Huang was in Beijing alongside Donald Trump's state-visit delegation, Financial Times reports. The ban applies to the China-only Blackwell-architecture card NVIDIA introduced last August specifically to comply with US export controls."

"The 5090D V2 had been marketed in China to gamers and 3D animators on the published-spec sheet. In practice, Chinese AI buyers cut off from the more advanced H100, H200 and Blackwell-class data-centre lines had been using the card as a workaround, because it retained the Blackwell architecture and could be racked at scale for training and inference workloads outside the explicit export-control framework."

"Huang's presence in Beijing during the ban window was itself a late addition to the Trump delegation. On 13 May Huang joined the China trip after a phone call from the president, picked up in Alaska as Air Force One refuelled. The NVIDIA CEO sat alongside Tim Cook, Elon Musk and other US tech leaders for the formal state-visit programme."

"The wider Chinese-domestic chip-procurement directive the ban sits inside has been in escalation across the spring. Beijing's instructions to its largest AI companies is to stop acquiring NVIDIA processors, including the H20 and the RTX Pro 6000D, on the framing that Huawei's Ascend line and Cambricon's Siyuan accelerators now match those products on the relevant workloads."

Read at TNW | Nvidia