The ban on the China-only Blackwell card landed during the Trump delegation’s state visit, on which the Nvidia CEO was a late addition. Chinese AI buyers had been using the 5090D V2 as a workaround for the H200 procurement vacuum.
China stopped granting import permits for Nvidia’s RTX 5090D V2 gaming card on 15 May, the same week Jensen Huang was in Beijing alongside Donald Trump’s state-visit delegation, Financial Times reports.
The ban applies to the China-only Blackwell-architecture card NVIDIA introduced last August specifically to comply with US export controls.
The 5090D V2 had been marketed in China to gamers and 3D animators on the published-spec sheet. In practice, Chinese AI buyers cut off from the more advanced H100, H200 and Blackwell-class data-centre lines had been using the card as a workaround, because it retained the Blackwell architecture and could be racked at scale for training and inference workloads outside the explicit export-control framework.
Huang’s presence in Beijing during the ban window was itself a late addition to the Trump delegation. On 13 May Huang joined the China trip after a phone call from the president, picked up in Alaska as Air Force One refuelled.
