NVIDIA Gives Up On China

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 5, 10:52AM EST

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China Sales Looked Promising For NVIDIA
Can China Build Better AI
NVIDIA Doesn’t Need China

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NVIDIA Gives Up On China — © 24/7 Wall St

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) expected to sell its H200 chips in China, and it expected to sell a lot of them. The deal has been on and off again amid trade talks between the White House and the Chinese government.

In an exclusive report, the FT writes, “Nvidia has stopped production of chips intended for the Chinese market, betting that regulatory barriers in Washington and Beijing will continue to limit sales to China.” The theory was that, because the H200 chips were less powerful than NVIDIA’s cutting-edge chips, China could not use them to supercharge its AI advances. Rumor had it that China’s sales of the H200 could reach into the hundreds of thousands of units.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is smart. In mid-2025, he said his company had no revenue from China in its earnings forecasts. He was right to do so.

China still has aspirations to build its own high-end AI chips, though there is no evidence that it is close to achieving that. Chinese officials also say that the DeepSeek AI product does not require much processing power to compete with OpenAI products, for example. DeepSeek engineers say that they can create versions of their software for a fraction of the cost for US companies. Even Huang says DeepSeek’s products are “fantastic.”

However, on paper, China is the second-largest market for AI chips. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said Chinese AI was only three to six months behind the US. At the World Economic Forum, he said: “This isn’t just about innovation—it’s about deployment at scale, and we’re not moving fast enough.” China has an almost limitless supply of electricity. In the US, the fight over electricity for AI data centers continues every day.

Unless something changes, NVIDIA shareholders can count on 70% quarterly top-line growth in the foreseeable future. They can also count on a market cap that will stay above $4 trillion. (It is $4.4 trillion today). Who needs China anyway?

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.