Within hours of U.S. President Donald Trump departing for Washington after concluding his China visit, Beijing has reportedly imposed restrictions on Nvidia’s flagship gaming graphics card, the RTX 5090D V2, marking a fresh flashpoint in ongoing U.S.–China technology tensions.
According to a Financial Times report, Chinese customs authorities have added the GPU to a list of restricted or banned imports. The move comes shortly after Trump held bilateral talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping on May 15, a meeting that also saw Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang accompanying the U.S. delegation in Beijing.
The timing of the restrictions has drawn widespread attention from global trade and technology analysts, particularly given Huang’s presence in China when the decision was reportedly implemented.
The RTX 5090D V2 was specifically engineered by Nvidia for the Chinese market, featuring reduced memory and bandwidth to comply with U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductor technologies. Initially targeted at gamers and digital content creators, the Blackwell-architecture-based chip has increasingly been adopted by Chinese AI developers for training artificial intelligence models.
Industry experts suggest the move reflects Beijing’s broader strategy to reduce dependence on advanced U.S. semiconductor technologies. By tightening controls on high-end GPUs with AI applications, China appears to be reinforcing its push for technological self-reliance amid intensifying competition with Washington.
Meanwhile, Chinese technology major Alibaba has announced its new AI processor, the Zhenwu M890, claiming performance improvements of up to three times over its previous generation. The company also stated it has already supplied more than 560,000 chips in the Zhenwu series, underscoring China’s accelerated efforts toward semiconductor independence as access to advanced Nvidia AI chips, including the H200 series, remains increasingly restricted.