BEIJING — Chinese Customs began blocking imports of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090D V2 graphics card on May 15, the same day a summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded. The card, built on Nvidia's Blackwell architecture, had been specifically engineered for the Chinese market to comply with United States export rules and was cleared for sale in China in August of last year.

The RTX 5090D V2 was added to Beijing's list of banned commodities during the summit, which ran from May 13 to May 15. Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang was included in Trump's delegation to China for the meetings. "My sense is that over time, the market will open," Huang said.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington and Beijing had opened talks on establishing safety "guardrails" for AI, with both sides seeking to prevent the most advanced AI models from falling into the hands of criminal or terrorist groups while keeping the door open for continued technological development. He said the US was comfortable engaging in such discussions because it held a commanding lead in AI technology over China. Bessent added that delegations from both countries were expected to begin formal consultations on how the two countries could agree on shared safety protocols without choking off industry growth.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer offered a different account of the summit agenda. "This was not a major topic of discussion at the bilateral meeting. We did not talk about chip export controls at the meeting," he said. Greer said US chief executives raised their own companies' concerns during the summit, and that the decision on whether to allow H200 imports was ultimately Beijing's.

The Chinese government has been urging local technology firms to prioritize domestic chips, such as Huawei's Ascend 910B, over Nvidia's H200 and H20 AI offerings, with zero imports of H200 chips to date. Beijing has blocked sales of both the H200 and H20 chips, and seeks to support domestic chipmakers including Huawei and Cambricon. The Trump administration has approved sales of H200 and H20 chips to Chinese technology groups such as Alibaba and Tencent.

Chinese AI developers use graphics cards to run open-source large language models such as Meta's Llama series, Google's Gemma and China's DeepSeek. Chinese consumers can still buy and deploy Nvidia's RTX 5080 graphics card, which falls outside the scope of US export controls. Local graphics card manufacturers in China include Lisuan Technology, Moore Threads and Biren Technology. Lisuan launched the LX 7G100 graphics card, which is said to be equivalent to Nvidia's RTX 4080.