Nvidia’s $5.5B Hit: US Export Ban On AI Chips To China Shakes Global AI Race

by News Editor

April 16, 2025

Nvidia just took a $5.5 billion punch to the balance sheet—courtesy of the U.S. government’s latest move to tighten the leash on AI chip exports to China. The company’s most advanced processor available in the Chinese market, the H20, has now fallen under indefinite export restrictions, triggering a 6% slide in Nvidia shares in after-hours trading.

The decision, announced Tuesday, marks a major escalation in the U.S.-China tech standoff and underscores Washington’s growing concern over how AI hardware could fuel China’s supercomputing ambitions. The U.S. Commerce Department has now slapped licensing requirements not only on Nvidia’s H20, but also on AMD’s MI308 and similar chips. AMD shares dropped 7% after the news.

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A Commerce Department spokesperson said the move reflects President Biden’s directive to safeguard U.S. national and economic security. Nvidia, meanwhile, confirmed the charges would cover unsold H20 inventory, outstanding purchase commitments, and related reserves.

A Workaround, Now Blocked

Nvidia had designed the H20 chip specifically to navigate around previous U.S. export limits—delivering toned-down performance but retaining high-speed interconnectivity. That design made the H20 attractive for AI inference tasks, an increasingly dominant segment of the market where models provide real-time answers rather than undergoing initial training.

Despite not being as powerful as Nvidia’s top-tier chips sold outside China, the H20 gained traction with major Chinese tech players including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance. Reuters previously reported that demand surged after startups like DeepSeek ramped up development of low-cost AI models.

But that very design—optimized for high-bandwidth memory access and chip-to-chip connectivity—set off alarm bells in Washington. Analysts argue it still carries supercomputing potential, especially if deployed at scale.

“Likely In Violation”

A Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Institute for Progress, didn’t mince words. In a statement Tuesday, it claimed that Tencent had already installed H20 chips in a facility likely used to train large AI models—potentially breaching U.S. export restrictions already in place. The group added that DeepSeek’s infrastructure, used for its latest V3 model, might also be in violation.

U.S. restrictions on chips used in supercomputing have been in effect since 2022. Now, the H20 is joining that list. Nvidia said it was formally notified on April 9 that the chip would require an export license—and on April 14, that the restriction would be indefinite. Whether the U.S. will issue any such licenses remains unclear.

A Fork In The Road

This latest move throws a wrench into Nvidia’s China strategy, just as demand in the region for generative AI tools is accelerating. It also highlights the growing friction between global innovation and geopolitical control—a tension Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang must now navigate carefully.

The setback comes one day after Nvidia unveiled plans to invest up to $500 billion into U.S.-based AI server infrastructure, working with partners like TSMC to align with American industrial policy.

Now, as Nvidia absorbs the financial blow and recalibrates, one thing is clear: the AI chip race isn’t just about performance anymore. It’s a front line in the broader battle over who controls the future of intelligent computing.

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Women Make Up A Majority Of The EU’s Science And Technology Workforce But The Real Gap Is Elsewhere

by News Editor

June 25, 2026

Women now make up the majority of the EU’s science and technology workforce. According to Eurostat, in 2025, more than 81.6 million people aged 15 to 74 were employed in science and technology occupations across the EU. Of those, 52.5% were women, equal to 42.8 million women. The number of women in these occupations rose by 27.9% compared with 2015, an increase of more than 9.3 million over a decade.

On the surface, the numbers resemble progress. However, Eurostat’s category requires context before that figure can be read accurately. The data refers to HRST, or Human Resources in Science and Technology, specifically people employed in science and technology occupations. These are roles where the main tasks require professional or technical knowledge in physical and life sciences, but also in social sciences and humanities. That definition is wider and broader than engineering, ICT, laboratory science, or high-tech research alone.

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Zooming In

The gender picture changes once the data moves from a wider definition of the workforce to the narrower scientist-and-engineer (research and manufacturing) subgroup.

Scientists and engineers represented almost a quarter of all people employed in science and technology in the EU in 2025. Eurostat describes scientists and engineers as often being the innovators at the centre of technology-led development, making them an important subgroup to focus on separately.

Women accounted for only 40.8% of scientists and engineers in 2025, despite making up more than half of the wider category. That share has increased by a mere 0.5 percentage points over the past decade. The absolute number of women working as scientists and engineers rose from 5.3 million in 2015 to 8.2 million in 2025, despite the push from national and international organisations to increase the number of women in the field. Europe has expanded the number of women in science and technology occupations over ten years. However, that expansion has not extended equally into the scientist-and-engineer subgroup, where much of Europe’s research and innovation work is conducted.

In 2025, of the 39.4 million women aged 25 to 64 working in science and technology occupations in the EU, 35.5 million worked in service activities. Only 2.7 million worked in manufacturing. Women accounted for 57.5% of science and technology employment in services, but only 31.3% in manufacturing.

In 2025, the highest shares of women employed in science and technology occupations were recorded in Latvia at 62.4%, followed by Hungary’s Great Plain and North region at 61.1%, Estonia at 60.5%, Poland’s Central macroregion at 60.4%, and Lithuania at 60.3%. No EU country recorded a majority of women among science and technology workers in manufacturing.

Break-down

Eurostat’s figures measure employment in broad science and technology occupations. They do not show job security, pay levels, management roles, promotion rates, research leadership, or whether women are concentrated in junior or senior workplace positions.

The classification of “senior” also requires additional explanation. Eurostat reports that 45.9% of science and technology workers aged 25 to 64 in the EU were classified as “senior” HRST in 2025. In this dataset, “senior” refers to workers aged 45 to 64. It does not mean senior manager, senior researcher, team lead, or decision-maker.

A high female share in the wider Human Resource Science and Technology (HRST) category does not parallel equal representation across scientists, engineers, manufacturing roles, senior posts, pay, research funding, or decision-making. These figures also reflect the occupational mix inside each country or region, not only structural progress across all areas of science and technology.

The Case Of Cyprus

Eurostat data places Cyprus’s overall science and technology employment at 37.2% of the labour force in 2025, slightly above the EU-27 figure of 36.9%, and above Greece at 26.8%, Malta at 33.9%, and Turkey at 18.2%. This figure covers the total share of the labour force employed in science and technology across all genders.

Progress Or Work-in-Progress?

52.5% in the broad category. 40.8% among scientists and engineers. 31.3% in manufacturing. Europe’s gender gap in science and technology hasn’t closed yet, and there is still work to be done to encourage and support more women to enter the field, especially in research and manufacturing.

Let’s not wait another decade for another couple of percentage points of hope.

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