Chinese online gamers and hobbyist artificial intelligence (AI) developers have been dealt a setback as Beijing banned the import of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090D V2, a graphics card specifically engineered for the Chinese market to comply with United States export rules, dealing another blow to the country’s technology community already caught in escalating chip-war tensions.

The RTX 5090D V2 was added to Beijing’s list of banned commodities during last week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, according to a Financial Times report. Built on Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture, the chip had been cleared for sale in the Chinese market last August.

Beijing’s ban adds to broader pressure on Nvidia in China, where the government has been urging local technology firms to prioritize domestic chips over Nvidia’s H200 and H20 AI offerings. Analysts say the H200 alone represents more than $14 billion in potential annual revenue for the US chipmaker.

The ban came as a surprise, because Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s last-minute inclusion in US President Donald Trump’s delegation to China from May 13 to 15 had fueled market expectations that he might secure Beijing’s approval to sell H200 chips in the country.

During the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington and Beijing had opened talks on establishing safety “guardrails” for AI, with both sides seeking to prevent the most advanced AI models from falling into the hands of criminal or terrorist groups while keeping the door open for continued technological development.

Bessent said the US was comfortable engaging in such discussions because it held a commanding lead in AI technology over China. He added that delegations from both countries were expected to begin formal consultations on how the two superpowers could agree on shared safety protocols without choking off industry growth.

According to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, chip export controls did not feature prominently in the Trump-Xi talks.

“This was not a major topic of discussion at the bilateral meeting. We did not talk about chip export controls at the meeting,” Greer told the media last week, adding that US chief executives raised their own companies’ concerns during the summit.

He stressed that the decision on whether to allow H200 imports was ultimately Beijing’s.

While Washington expected the chip wars to de-escalate, China tightened its grip further. Chinese Customs began blocking imports of the RTX 5090D V2 on May 15, the day Trump’s delegation departed Beijing.

Some commentators say the ban affects not only Chinese online gamers but also hobbyist AI developers, who use their graphics cards to run open-source large language models (LLMs), such as Meta’s Llama series, Google’s Gemma and China’s DeepSeek, at home.

“Although the RTX 5090D V2 appears to be a gaming graphics card, its actual uses go far beyond that,” writes a columnist for Kdnet.net, a Hainan-based news outlet. “Because access to Nvidia’s more powerful AI graphics processing units (GPUs) has been restricted, many Chinese AI developers have been using the RTX 5090D V2 to tap into the computing power of Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture for AI training and inference tasks.”

“In other words, banning this card is equivalent to cutting off a back channel that allowed indirect access to Blackwell computing power while circumventing export controls,” he says. “What is unfolding points in one clear direction. The US is using export controls to pressure China, while China has decided it no longer wants even downgraded versions of foreign chips, turning instead to homegrown alternatives.”

He said the episode marked a new phase in the US-China chip contest, though where it ultimately would lead remained to be seen.

Local manufacturers

Back in October 2022, the Biden administration unveiled a sweeping set of export controls that banned the sale of Nvidia’s A100 and H100 chips to China. Nvidia responded by launching downgraded versions, the A800 and H800, tailored for the Chinese market.

In October 2023, Washington tightened the rules further, banning the A800 and H800 chips as well as RTX 4090 graphics cards from being shipped to China. Nvidia again sought to salvage its market position, launching further scaled-back versions, including the H20. Although the Trump administration had once banned H20 exports to China in 2025, it later gave the green light to exports of both the H20 and H200 chips.

But then, Beijing urged Chinese technology firms to prioritize local chips, such as Huawei’s Ascend 910B, resulting in zero imports of H200 chips to date.

A similar pattern played out in the graphics card segment.

When Nvidia launched the RTX 5090 in January 2025, it planned a downgraded version, the RTX 5090D, for China, but Washington blocked that shipment as well. A further scaled-back iteration, the RTX 5090D V2, eventually went on sale in China last August. Now Beijing has banned that version as well, leaving greater market opportunities for local manufacturers such as Lisuan Technology, Moore Threads and Biren Technology.

A Henan-based columnist writing under the pen name “Renjian Siliang” says most online gamers would not notice a difference between the RTX 5090 and its downgraded version when running games at 4K resolution, as Nvidia only downgraded some non-core features. However, he says that if the downgraded card is used for 8K gaming or for handling large volumes of three-dimensional imagery, its performance becomes unstable.

He adds that the difference would also be noticeable when hobbyists use the downgraded card for small-scale AI training and inference at home.

Meanwhile, some observers are doubtful whether banning the RTX 5090D V2 will push Chinese consumers toward local graphics cards.

In fact, Chinese consumers can still buy and deploy Nvidia’s RTX 5080, which falls outside the scope of US export controls against China. Media reports said the RTX 5090 runs 30% to 68% faster than the RTX 5080, but the latter remains several times faster than the best available Chinese graphics card.

Lisuan Technology has recently launched the LX 7G100, said to be equivalent to Nvidia’s RTX 4080, a last-generation graphics card.

Read: Trump-Xi summit puts US exports, Iran at center of reset bid

Follow Jeff Pao on X at @jeffpao3