Overview

• Chinese firms Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance ordered over $12 billion worth of NVIDIA H20 GPUs in anticipation of U.S. export controls introduced in April 2025.
• Approximately one million H20 GPUs were stockpiled by these companies, representing a year's supply, though it remains unclear if all orders were fulfilled before the ban.
• The U.S. government cited the H20's advanced capabilities, including memory and interconnect bandwidth, as reasons for the export restriction over national security concerns.
• NVIDIA faces a $5.5 billion writedown on unsold H20 inventory that can no longer be shipped to China following the ban.
• TSMC is collaborating with the U.S. Commerce Department to investigate potentially illicit orders placed by Chinese firms through global subsidiaries.