Nvidia said to have kept some customers in the dark about China restrictions - report

It just gets messier and messier. Reuters is now reporting that Nvidia has kept some of its China customers in the dark despite being informed about new restrictions to its H20 chips about a week ago, citing two sources familiar with the matter.

Nvidia disclosed that US officials had informed the chipmaker on 9 April that H20 chips would require and export license for sales to China. This before the announcement here yesterday.

But even with that knowledge, Nvidia's China sales team reportedly did not appear to be informed ahead of the announcement. And major Chinese cloud companies were still anticipating deliveries of Nvidia's H20 chips by year-end, unaware of the impending restriction.

I guess we'll have to see what Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance will have to say about all this. They are after all the more prominent players in the space that had been stepping up orders for H20 chips to maintain an edge over its AI comptetitors.

In any case, it seems like this move will be pushing customers in China to move towards Huawei's chips as the alternative. So, they stand ready to benefit the most from that if this persists for longer.