NVIDIA's China-Exclusive GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 GPU has been banned in China, but the restriction doesn't come from the United States; instead, it's by China itself.
While the United States eases restrictions on NVIDIA's AI GPUs, such as the H200, allowing multiple AI firms to procure up to 75,000 units, China itself is now banning one of the fastest gaming GPUs that is designed exclusively for its market.
Last year, NVIDIA announced the RTX 5090 D alongside the standard RTX 5090. The RTX 5090 D was made exclusively for China, but soon after its launch, the graphics card was banned from sale in China following updated US regulations. Soon after the ban, NVIDIA launched a second variant with even more cut-down specifications than the RTX 5090 D, called the RTX 5090 D v2.
The biggest difference was the reduced 24 GB VRAM versus the 32 GB on the original card, & a narrower memory bus. This meant that those who wanted to repurpose the card for AI using its 32 GB frame buffer were out of luck. Reports currently suggest that a lot of AI firms are retrofitting custom RTX 5090 D v2 with double the VRAM, up to 48 GB.
But the more concerning news regarding the NVIDIA RTX 5090 D v2 comes from HKEPC, who report that market sources have suggested that China is moving to ban the gaming flagship entirely. It is said that Chinese motherboard manufacturers recently received a notification from customs authorities that the RTX 5090 D v2 will not be approved for processing, and retailers who are importing it will not get a clearance or sales permit.
Market rumors suggest that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 has been banned from the Chinese market, but this time it's not the US that's banning it, but China. According to Chinese motherboard manufacturers, they recently received a notification from Chinese customs that the GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 graphics cards will not be approved for processing and therefore cannot enter China. This sudden ban caught NVIDIA off guard.
It was initially thought that the recently concluded US-China talks, with Trump bringing Jensen Huang to the US, would ease tensions. However, instead of easing restrictions on the NVIDIA H200 AI chip, the Chinese government has also banned the import of the GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 for the gaming market.
HKEPC
Furthermore, the RTX 5090 D v2 will have nowhere else to go since it is made for Chinese markets exclusively. One likelihood is that the GPUs would be smuggled through a network of black market dealers who will smuggle these to other countries, or just find a way to sell them directly to AI firms.
We recently covered how China's largest retail platform, JD.com, had an exclusive page for "AI GPUs" where it was selling several banned NVIDIA products, including the RTX 5090 D v2. The page was taken down as soon as the discovery hit mainstream media.
It is now known that Chinese customs has notified logistics companies that the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 will not be issued import permits. This sudden ban has completely caught NVIDIA off guard. Since the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 is a product specifically for the Chinese market, it cannot be sold in other countries.
A Chinese motherboard manufacturer stated that they currently do not know why Chinese customs banned the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 D v2. Since the AI computing power of the 5090 D v2 is already locked, banning the RTX 5090 D v2 will not help support the development of Chinese AI chips. It is highly likely that the Chinese government considers the RTX 5090 D v2 an insulting and downgraded product and does not want it to appear in the Chinese market.
HKEPC
All of this makes things harder for gamers in China, who will now have to rely on the RTX 5080 as the fastest gaming solution. China is also doubling down on domestic hardware with several GPU companies accelerating their development to meet demand, but so far, none of them even come close to NVIDIA's latest RTX 50 series offerings, and the NVIDIA/AMD options available to them are rising in prices constantly.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。