China banned RTX 5090D V2 while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was visiting

Beijing banned an Nvidia gaming chip while the company’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, was visiting China with Donald Trump last week, the latest salvo in the superpowers’ battle to dominate AI.

The chip was added to a list of banned goods at China’s customs checkpoints last Friday, according to a copy of the document seen by the FT and two people with knowledge of the matter.

The move highlights Beijing’s determination to keep out Nvidia’s chips, especially the degraded versions made to comply with US export controls. The Chinese government wants to support domestic chipmakers such as Huawei and Cambricon as they catch up to their US rivals.

The Nvidia chip, known as the RTX 5090D V2, was introduced last August to comply with US export controls. It was aimed at Chinese gamers and 3D animators, but it has also been bought by AI developers, cut off from the most sophisticated Nvidia products.

Nvidia’s Huang said on Monday that he believed China’s market would become accessible to US chip suppliers. “My sense is that over time, the market will open,” he told Bloomberg TV.

Sales of other Nvidia chips including the H200 and the H20, another China-specific product that Nvidia sold earlier in the market, have been blocked by Beijing even though the Trump administration has approved sales to Chinese tech groups such as Alibaba and Tencent.

Huang joined Trump at the last minute to be part of a US delegation to Beijing, where he was seen eating local delicacies and touring the Chinese capital outside the official summit.

Trump said on Air Force One after visiting Beijing that China “chose not to” approve the purchases of Nvidia’s H200 chips because “they want to develop their own.”

Huawei is set to capture the largest share of China’s AI chip market this year, with sales jumping by at least 60 percent amid strong demand from Chinese companies seeking domestic alternatives to Nvidia, the FT reported earlier this month.

Morgan Stanley forecasts that China’s AI chip market will reach $67 billion in 2030, with 86 percent expected to be supplied by Chinese groups. The US bank estimates the market to be worth about $21 billion this year from domestic suppliers.

China’s AI chip sector was previously dominated by Nvidia, which sold products worth just over $17 billion—mostly H20 chips—in the Chinese market in the 2025 financial year.

China’s customs agency and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The chipmaker and world’s most valuable company is scheduled to report earnings on Wednesday afternoon in results regarded as a bellwether for the state of the AI infrastructure boom.

Additional contributions by Tina Hu in Beijing and Wenjie Ding in Shanghai