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Notes -
The Nvidia H20 exports ban is back on?
Lets recap. DeepSeek stuns the world by dropping a model almost as good as SOTA models while flexing incredible performance gains through cunning Chinese hacking. It's revealed they used lower end H20 GPUs vs the more decadent A100 / H100 / B100 class chips that fat American programmers use. Thusly, the US moves to ban exports of H20s as well.
Except last week, on April 9th, following the news of Jensen Huang dropping a million bucks at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, the ban is apparently lifted, stunning all China hawks in the country (and AI safetyists) and demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.
But today, Nvidia announces the export ban is on. And ... apparently was never lifted? The market reacts and knocks them down a few points.
What... happened? Checking back, it seems the only source for the news that the H20 ban was lifted was "two unnamed sources" reported by NPR.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5356480/nvidia-china-ai-h20-chips-trump
Weirdly, neither the USG nor Nvidia commented on it.
Can we read into the fact that since neither party commented on it, lifting the H20 ban was actually on the table? Was this leaked by one side to put pressure on the other? Was it a trial balloon? Or do we even trust that NPR actually reached out for comment like they said they did?
$1 million donation is chump change at those levels. Possibly the donation was to secure the sit down dinner where they talked, not actually a promise for any kind of outcome. That seems way more in line with that amount of money.
Yeah, "pay for a face-to-face" is political standard, it doesn't promise anything more than that. If we believe that Burisma paying Hunter big bucks didn't get them anything more than maybe the hope of a phone call with Joe, then same here.
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