Less than a week after Nvidia confirmed it would resume shipping its H20 chips to China, the company has reportedly told its Chinese customers that supplies of the GPU are limited.

Citing two people with knowledge of the matter, The Information reported that when the US government announced plans to impose additional restrictions on exports of the H20 chips to China in April, Nvidia voided customer orders and canceled manufacturing capacity with TSMC, resulting in the chipmaker reallocating those production lines to other customers.

Consequently, manufacturing new chips from scratch would take nine months, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during a press event in Beijing this week, with the report adding that Nvidia plans to use remaining existing stock to fulfil orders, but is not looking to restart production of the chips.

First announced in 2023, the H20 GPUs are a less sophisticated version of Nvidia’s H100 processors and were designed specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with US export controls. Last week, Nvidia also publicly announced it had developed a new “fully compliant” chip for the Chinese market, the Nvidia RTX PRO GPU, which the company says is “ideal for digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics.”

Despite Nvidia and its rival chipmaker AMD receiving assurances from the Trump administration that it would be able to resume shipping chips to China imminently, US lawmakers have since criticized the decision, with Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, the head of a House of Representatives panel on China, writing to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to condemn the move and request a briefing.

In the letter, sent on behalf of the panel, Moolenaar said: “I strongly supported the administration's ban on H20 sales… we must not allow US companies to sell these vital artificial intelligence (AI) assets to Chinese entities."

He added that there was also evidence that Chinese companies were using H20 processors in ways that may breach current US export rules, such as building clusters that meet the US government’s definition of a supercomputer, which is a restricted usage.

However, when it comes to export restrictions, Moolenaar argues that a dynamic standard based on China’s known domestic capabilities should be introduced. By measuring the performance of H20 chips against advanced semiconductors being produced in the US, rather than those being manufactured in China, the government could be giving China chips that are more powerful than anything currently in production in the country, he said.