TL;DR
- Customs Block: China appears to have stopped Nvidia’s China-only RTX 5090D V2 GPU at customs during Jensen Huang’s Beijing visit.
- Workaround Limit: Nvidia designed the card in August 2025 to fit U.S. export rules, yet it may still face China-side approval barriers.
- Market Stakes: Blocked H200 deliveries and Huawei’s projected gains show Nvidia risks losing more ground in China’s AI chip market.
China appears to have blocked Nvidia’s RTX 5090D V2 while Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang was in Beijing last week, creating a new obstacle for a company still trying to keep chip sales alive in China.
China appears to have placed the model on a banned-goods list at customs checkpoints on May 16.
The reported stop is material because the RTX 5090D V2 was built as a China-specific fallback after U.S. export rules cut Nvidia off from selling many higher-end chips there.
Why Nvidia’s China Workaround Still Hit a Wall
Nvidia introduced the RTX 5090D V2 in August 2025 to comply with U.S. export controls. August 2025 needs to stay in view because it shows the company had already redesigned hardware for China well before the latest reported customs problem surfaced.
A lower memory capacity and bandwidth profile made the China-only card a constrained version of Nvidia’s flagship line rather than a standard launch. Chinese gamers and 3D artists were the obvious buyers, but AI developers also bought it after access to Nvidia’s stronger hardware narrowed. Huang used a Bloomberg interview to strike a more optimistic tone: “My sense is that over time, the market will open.”
Washington’s rules explain why the RTX 5090D V2 exists. If the customs claim holds, the workaround can still fail on the China side, leaving Nvidia to satisfy one government’s export limits while waiting for another government’s market approval.
Blocked H200 Deals Show the Same China-Side Constraint
Nvidia’s data-center business already points to the same bottleneck. Washington had approved roughly 10 Chinese firms to buy H200 accelerators, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, and each customer could purchase as many as 75,000 chips. On paper, that looked like a meaningful opening.
Real deliveries still lagged behind the approvals. H200 chips still had no completed deliveries, and no H200 deliveries had started as of May 14. Reuters tied the stalled deals to tighter security rules around foreign technology dependencies, showing how formal approval can stop short of installed computing capacity.
Nvidia’s reported RTX 5090D V2 problem pushes that same constraint into the fallback GeForce line. A product can clear U.S. export rules and still miss the Chinese market if Beijing decides the hardware does not fit broader industrial or security goals.
Trump summed up that policy logic in blunt terms, saying “they want to develop their own.”
Huawei’s Gains Show What Nvidia Risks Losing
Nvidia sold more than $17 billion in China in fiscal 2025, mostly through H20 chips, so another blocked product lane carries real weight even after China’s share of Nvidia’s revenue shrank. Huawei may take the largest share of China’s AI chip market in 2026 as buyers shift toward domestic alternatives.
A related Morgan Stanley forecast says China’s AI chip market could reach $67 billion by 2030, with domestic suppliers controlling 86 percent. Together, those figures imply that every delayed Nvidia shipment can do more than postpone near-term revenue: it can help local rivals lock in customers, software tuning, and procurement habits.
Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations, put the policy stakes in direct terms.
“Any deal that allows Nvidia to sell more chips to China means fewer Nvidia chips for U.S. firms, and a smaller U.S. lead in AI over China.”
Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations (via Reuters)
No public confirmation has yet pinned down the RTX 5090D V2 stop. Even without that confirmation, Nvidia’s position in China already looks squeezed by U.S. export controls, China-side approval friction, and a domestic market that may be moving further toward Huawei and other local suppliers.
