Mid-way through April, we heard about sanctions affecting shipments of NVIDIA's H20 AI chips into China. Despite (rumored) best efforts made by Jensen Huang and colleagues, the US government has banned the export of Team Green's formerly sanction-conformant design. Similarly, NVIDIA prepared a slightly less potent GPU for gaming applications—exclusively for the Chinese market. Despite sporting a restricted GB202 "Blackwell" GPU die, the GeForce RTX 5090D 32 GB is still a monstrous prospect. According to Chinese PC hardware news sources, Team Green representatives have sent alerts to "all" of its Chinese add-in-card partners (AICs)—early warning signs have indicated a possible cut-off of GB202 GPUs in the near future. A member of the Chiphell forum disclosed some insider knowledge and dismissed unfounded speculation about RTX 5090D cards being replaced by "full fat" RTX 5090 options.

sthuasheng commented on Team Green's alleged bulletin—distributed at some point last week: "the notice only said that the supply of RTX 5090D was suspended, ...this did not mean any sales or transportation ban; it urged everyone not to make any speculations or judgments unless there was an official notice issued at a later date. After this notice was issued, each AIC began to notify agents to suspend sales, because the inventory of 5090D has always been very small, so it is necessary to keep these stocks to observe the subsequent situation and deal with the subsequent after-sales. At the same time, we might as well speculate that each AIC and dealer may also have the intention to stockpile 5090D units and then sell them at an elevated price." BenchLife.info decided to reach out to industry moles, following an absorption of various Chiphell whispers.BenchLife.info's weekend report outlined the secretive nature of certain key players: "we all know that NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090D is a product extended due to TPP restrictions. Although the AI computing power is limited, for gamers, the gaming performance is not much different from that of GeForce RTX 5090...As far as we know, NVIDIA did not notify the AIC partners in a formal document (most of them were notified verbally), and some AIC partners have already notified the supply chain to suspend the preparation and delivery of GeForce RTX 5090D...On the other hand, a cooling module manufacturer we are familiar with has also received a notice from its AIC partner to suspend orders and subsequent material preparations for the GeForce RTX 5090 D, and significantly reduce its shipment priority."

Team Green's H20 AI chip reportedly fell victim to newly revised import standards—BenchLife.info mentioned these restrictions in their investigative article: "if the (candidate) chip meets the following conditions, it needs a license to be exported to China: the total memory bandwidth reaches 1,400 GB/s or more; the I/O bandwidth reaches 1,100 GB/s or more; and the total bandwidth of the two reaches 1,700 MB/s or more." Apparently the "borked" GB202 GPU present within GeForce RTX 5090D cards has "touched the edge" of freshly redrafted requirements. Last week, TechPowerUp and several Western news outlets covered the emergence of custom blower-type GeForce RTX 5090D cards—destined for deployment within AI workstations.