After NVIDIA's chief financial officer Collette Kress confirmed during her firm's latest earnings call that not only had NVIDIA secured US approval to sell the advanced H200 AI GPUs to China, but it was uncertain of earning any revenue from the sales, CEO Jensen Huang lamented that his firm had conceded the Chinese market to local firms. In an interview with CNBC, the executive remarked that since his firm had ceded the Chinese market, Huawei and other players were performing well and were likely to thrive.
NVIDIA's Huang Says His Firm Would Be "Delighted" To Serve Chinese Market
In his interview with CNBC, Huang asserted that the reason local Chinese companies were performing well was that his firm had had to abdicate the Chinese market. NVIDIA has been placed under strict US government restrictions that prevent it from selling its advanced AI GPUs to China. As part of a workaround to the sanctions, the firm has developed China-specific GPUs; however, the Chinese government has banned some of the products to prevent companies from securing import orders for them.
During NVIDIA's earnings call, CFO Collette Kress briefly discussed the situation in China and remarked:
While the US government has approved licenses for H200 to be shipped to China-based customers, we have yet to generate any revenue. And we are uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country. As a result, consistent with last quarter, we are not including any China data center compute revenue in our outlook.
Talking to CNBC's Sarah Eisen, the NVIDIA CEO remarked that Huawei was very likely to "have an extraordinary year coming up." He added that the local Chinese ecosystem was "doing quite well, because we've evacuated that market."
Speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles earlier this month, Huang had stated that China should not have the latest NVIDIA AI chips and added that "we are huge supporters of the United States having the first, the most and the best." The H200 chips recently cleared by the US government belong to the older generation of Hopper GPUs and are followed by the Blackwell and the Vera Rubin designs.
While the Chinese domestic semiconductor ecosystem, and particularly Huawei, has seen more orders following the US ban, reports have suggested that some of the growth for the technology giant has come due to pressure from the government. Additionally, further US sanctions on advanced chip manufacturing equipment have forced Huawei and other players to make chips with older manufacturing technologies.
Estimates suggest that not only are the best US AI chips roughly five times more powerful than Huawei's products, but also that even if Huawei were able to produce two million AI chips in 2026, its aggregate computing power would still sit at 4% of NVIDIA's.
NVIDIA's market dynamics have also started to shift as the industry moves toward agentic AI. The push to AI agents has brought back the importance of CPUs and pushed Intel Corporation back into the limelight as CEO Lip-Bu Tan aggressively pursues a long overdue turnaround.
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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