(Reuters) -The U.S. commerce department has started issuing licenses to Nvidia to export its H20 chips to China after CEO Jensen Huang met President Donald Trump at the White House, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
The Financial Times cited a U.S. official as saying that the bureau of industry and security, the arm of the commerce department that oversees export controls, had begun to issue licenses for the H20.
Nvidia had tailored the H20 chips specially for the Chinese market in order to comply
with Biden-era AI chip export controls.
This comes after the U.S. last month reversed an April ban on Nvidia selling the H20 chip to China.
Nvidia said in July that it was filing applications with the U.S. government to resume sales to China of its H20 graphics processing unit, and has been assured by the U.S. it will get the licenses soon.
Trump reversed course on the April restrictions after Huang visited the White House and directly lobbied the president, according to the report, but Nvidia was frustrated that the administration had not started issuing the licenses three weeks after the decision.
Huang visited the White House on Wednesday and held another meeting with the president and two days after the meeting, the commerce department started issuing the licenses, FT reported citing people familiar with the decision.
Nvidia had said last month that its products have no "backdoors" that would allow remote access or control after China raised concerns over potential security risks in the firm's H20 artificial intelligence chip.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined comment while the U.S. Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru and Karen Freifeld; Editing by Alan Barona)
