A week after Nvidia reportedly told its Chinese customers supplies of its H20 GPUs were limited and restarting production could take nine months, the company has ordered 300,000 chips from TSMC, Reuters said.

According to the news outlet, following the Trump administration’s decision to start granting the necessary export licenses for the chips, strong demand from Chinese customers has resulted in Nvidia deciding to manufacture more chips, rather than just relying on its existing stockpile.

Citing sources who declined to be identified, Reuters said Nvidia currently has an inventory of between 600,000 and 700,000 H20 chips, with the 300,000 on order set to bring its stockpile in line with the total amount sold by the company in 2024.

First announced in 2023, the H20 GPUs are a less sophisticated version of Nvidia’s H100 processors and were designed specifically for the Chinese market in compliance with US export controls.

Chinese customers who want to purchase the chips must now submit documentation that includes information such as order volume forecasts, the report said.

Despite Nvidia and its rival chipmaker AMD receiving assurances from the Trump administration that they would be able to resume shipping chips to China imminently, US lawmakers have criticized the policy reversal.

Following a letter from Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, the head of a House of Representatives panel on China, to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in which Moolenaar condemned the move to restart exports of the chip, a group of 20 national security experts and former government officials have sent a separate letter to Lutnick urging the Trump administration to reverse its decision.

Signatories of the letter, which includes Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security advisor, Peter Mattis, a former Congressional-executive commission on China, and Lloyd Thrall, former deputy assistant secretary of defense, labeled the decision a “strategic misstep.”

“The H20 is a potent accelerator of China’s frontier AI capabilities, not an outdated AI chip,” the letter read.

“Designed specifically to work around export control thresholds, the H20 is optimized for inference, the process responsible for the dramatic capabilities gains made by the latest generation of frontier AI reasoning models.

"For inference tasks, the H20 outperforms even the H100, an AI chip this administration has restricted access to due to its advanced capabilities.”

It concluded: “The decision to ban H20 exports earlier this year was the right one. We ask you to stand by that principle and continue blocking the sale of advanced AI chips to China as America works to maintain its technological edge.”