Nvidia (NVDA) said Wednesday that the US government has not finalized a recent agreement that would require the AI chipmaker to share 15% of the revenue from sales of its H20 chips to China in exchange for export licenses.
“[US government] officials have expressed an expectation that the USG will receive 15% of the revenue generated from licensed H20 sales,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in a call following Nvidia’s second quarter earnings results. “But to date, the USG has not published a regulation codifying such a requirement.”
Nvidia was hit with a surprise export ban on sales of its H20 chips to China in April — a move that cost the chipmaker $2.5 billion in lost sales and $4.5 billion in inventory in the first quarter.
But the Trump administration said in July it would grant Nvidia export licenses for the H20 chips in exchange for 15% of the revenue from those sales. The government’s unprecedented agreement with Nvidia is likely to face legal challenges due to the US Constitution’s ban on export taxes — a risk Nvidia acknowledged in its quarterly filing with the SEC.
“Any request for a percentage of the revenue by the USG may subject us to litigation, increase our costs, and harm our competitive position and benefit competitors that are not subject to such arrangements,” the company said in its filing.
While “a select number” of the chipmaker’s Chinese customers received licenses to buy the lower-power Nvidia chips in the past few weeks, the company hasn’t made any H20 sales based on those licenses.
“We’re still waiting on several of the geopolitical issues going back and forth between the governments and the companies trying to determine their purchases and what they want to do,” Kress said.
“If geopolitical issues reside, we should ship $2 [billion] to $5 billion in H20 revenue in Q3, and if we had more orders, we can bill more,” Kress said.
Given that Nvidia made no H20 sales in the second quarter, the chipmaker’s China revenue dove to $2.8 billion during the three months that ended July 27, down from $5.5 billion in the first quarter and $3.7 billion last year. On average, China accounted for roughly 15% of the company’s revenue over the prior 10 quarters. In the second quarter, that share fell to 5.9%.
Nvidia began sales of its H20 GPUs (graphics processing units) — less powerful versions of its prior-generation Hopper chips compliant with tightening US trade rules — to China in 2024.
Kress told analysts the US government began reviewing licenses for sales of the H20 chips to China in late July.
