Nvidia’s Huang Admits a Defeat in China

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Nov 7, 9:20AM EST

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Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang says there are no active discussions about selling high-end AI chips to China.
Nvidia remains caught in the U.S.-China trade war, perhaps forever.

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Nvidia’s Huang Admits a Defeat in China — © master1305 / Getty Images

China was supposed to be the next huge sales frontier for artificial intelligence (AI) chip giant Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction), the most valuable company in the world. China is racing to beat the United States in AI advances. One key question about that push is whether China can win without Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chips. CEO Jensen Huang said that there were “no active discussions” with Chinese firms.

Huang has been battling to open China to his high-end chips. Instead, Nvidia has been caught in the U.S.-China trade war. The war is based in part on whether the Trump administration wants China to have access to America’s best AI hardware. One argument is that the Blackwell will help China beat the U.S. in the AI race.

Huang had said that sales in China could reach well into the billions of dollars. However, sales of Nvidia’s less powerful chips will not get it there. At one point, Huang said Nvidia did not expect any Chinese revenue to show up in quarterly financial results.

Huang told Reuters, “It’s up to China when they would like Nvidia products to go back to serve the Chinese market. I look forward to them changing their policy.” In terms of Nvidia’s short-term revenue, demand for its chips is so huge, it may not matter much. The pace of AI data center construction is extraordinary. And large tech companies like Microsoft and OpenAI appear to have limitless dollars. They have to jockey to buy Blackwell, for the time being. And the “time being” could last a long time.

Nvidia may never get much revenue from China. The country has been making its own chips and boasting about its AI programming prowess. It claims it can build world-class AI software without any hardware from the U.S. However, that is impossible to confirm.

For the time being, and perhaps forever, China is not budging. Neither is the Trump administration. So, Nvidia remains stuck.

Nvidia Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2025–2030

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.