‘Deeply painful’: Nvidia CEO says a new chip ban has cost it $15 billion

President Donald Trump’s escalating trade war has cost Nvidia (NVDA) $15 billion in business, the company’s CEO said Monday.

Jensen Huang made the comments during an interview with tech analyst Ben Thompson at the Computex trade show in Taipei. He said that America’s restrictions against exporting its H20 chips in China has had an unprecedented impact on the firm.

“We’ve written off — I think it’s $5.5 billion. No company in history has ever written off that much inventory, so this additional ban on Nvidia’s H20 is deeply painful,” Huang said. He continued: It’s “enormously costly. Not only am I losing $5.5 billion, we wrote off $5.5 billion, we walked away from $15 billion of sales and probably — what is it? — $3 billion worth of taxes.”

Nvidia designed the H20 chip to comply with the Biden administration’s export rules. But those rules became even stricter under Trump and barred Nvidia from selling the chips in China, even after the company pared down their capabilities.

While this is the first time Huang has cited a dollar amount publicly, it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Wall Street analysts had estimated that Nvidia would suffer a hit of between $10 and $16 billion as a result of the ban.

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable chipmaker with a market capitalization of about $3.3 trillion. But its stock is down 2.1% so far this year amid the ongoing trade war.

Meanwhile, while the U.S. limits its tech exports to the country, Chinese tech firms have put renewed focus on manufacturing chips in-house. Xiaomi said Monday thatit will invest at least $6.9 billion over the next decade to develop its own chips. In April, Huawei announced that it was getting ready to test powerful, new AI chips that could rival those made by Nvidia.

Beijing has slammed the U.S. approach and Trump’s attempts to pressure other countries to cut their own trade with China. Earlier this month, China’s foreign ministry said it firmly opposes any trade agreements between the U.S. and third-party countries “at the expense of China,” framing the moves as aggressive rather than defensive.

—Catherine Baab contributed to this article.