By Hassan Mujtaba
Publication Date: 2026-05-19 14:10:00
NVIDIA’s China-Exclusive GeForce RTX 5090 D v2 GPU has been banned in China, but the restriction doesn’t come from the United States; instead, it’s by China itself.
NVIDIA’s Fastest Gaming GPU for China, the RTX 5090 D v2, Is Restricted from Sales In The Country
While the United States eases restrictions on NVIDIA’s AI GPUs, such as the H200, allowing multiple AI firms to procure up to 75,000 units, China itself is now banning one of the fastest gaming GPUs that is designed exclusively for its market.
Last year, NVIDIA announced the RTX 5090 D alongside the standard RTX 5090. The RTX 5090 D was made exclusively for China, but soon after its launch, the graphics card was banned from sale in China following updated US regulations. Soon after the ban, NVIDIA launched a second variant with even more cut-down specifications than the RTX 5090 D, called the RTX 5090 D v2.
The biggest difference was the reduced 24 GB VRAM versus the 32 GB on the original card, & a narrower memory bus. This meant that those who wanted to repurpose the card for AI using its 32 GB frame buffer were out of luck. Reports currently suggest that a lot of AI firms are retrofitting custom RTX 5090 D v2 with double the VRAM, up to 48 GB.
But the more concerning news regarding the NVIDIA RTX 5090 D v2 comes from HKEPC, who report that market sources have suggested that China is moving to ban the gaming flagship entirely. It is said that…
