According to news on March 1, Japan's Mizuho Securities (Mizuho) recently released a latest report stating that based on industry news and Mizuho Securities' team investigation in Washington, the Trump administration may introduce new export control measures for AI chips to China.


Mizuho Securities said its head of U.S. government affairs has recently taken note of nominations from the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC), including Assistant Secretary Landon Heid and Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Undersecretary Jeffrey Kessler. Mizuho Securities believes their appointments could lead to:

1. A comprehensive ban on all AI chips entering China, affecting NVIDIA H20/B20 and some traditional chips (28nm+).

2. Targeted suspension of export licenses.

Mizuho Securities believes that this will affect Nvidia's revenue in fiscal year 2026 by approximately US$4-6 billion, with an impact on earnings per share of approximately US$0.13-0.18.

Data shows that Nvidia H20 is the strongest AI chip among the three China-specific AI acceleration chips launched in compliance with U.S. export control requirements after the previous A100/A800 and H100/H800 were banned from export to China. Although it is a "castrated" version based on H100, it can provide up to 296INT8TOPS/FP8TFLOPS computing power, and also has 96GBHBM3 memory and 4.0TB/s memory bandwidth, making it competitive with entry-level AI processors. The B20 is rumored to be an iterative product designed by Nvidia to prevent the H20 from being banned, and may once again cut performance or streamline HBM capacity.

Previously, SemiAnalysis analyst Dylan Patel predicted that Nvidia would ship more than 1 million H20 chips to the Chinese market in 2024, which would bring Nvidia more than $12 billion in revenue.

If the news from Mizuho Securities is true, Nvidia’s AI chip business in China will undoubtedly be significantly affected again. In addition to NVIDIA, the AI ​​chip and GPU businesses of Intel and AMD in China may also be affected. In addition, Broadcom's related AI chip design service business in China may also be affected.

Mizuho Securities predicts that the final restrictions may be announced in a few weeks. The appointment and policy are yet to be confirmed.