Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang has never been coy about the central role China plays in the company’s future. But his latest comments in Washington this week laid bare a deeper unease inside the world’s most valuable chipmaker.
After meeting U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday, Huang confirmed he was still unsure whether Beijing would even allow Chinese firms to buy the company’s proposed H200 artificial intelligence chips, even if Washington greenlights sales.
The uncertainty amounts to an extraordinary moment for a company that built its global AI leadership partly on enormous demand from Chinese cloud giants and research labs. Now, Huang is lobbying the U.S. administration and Congress to loosen export restrictions that have cut off Nvidia’s access to its biggest overseas market.
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At the same time, a new crop of Chinese semiconductor players is advancing high-end processors of their own, accelerating a shift that could close the door on Nvidia for years or permanently.
According to Bloomberg, Huang said he had spoken with Trump about export controls during their meeting but did not share specifics. Asked whether China would even accept the H200 if Washington approved the sale, he answered, “We don’t know. We have no clue.” He then made a candid point about market reality, saying, “We can’t degrade chips that we sell to China, they won’t accept that.”
The H200 sits one generation behind Nvidia’s current flagship processors. Washington has blocked the company’s most advanced chips from entering China, citing national-security concerns tied to advanced model training and military use cases. The proposed H200 offering was seen as a possible compromise, but even that pathway is now shaky.
Analysts in Beijing say the discomfort inside Nvidia is real. Ma Jihua, a veteran telecom researcher quoted by the Global Times, said the company’s recent push in Washington shows genuine worry about the pace of China’s ecosystem overhaul. Ma noted that the H200 still leads in performance, memory bandwidth, and its integrated software suite, but the window for Nvidia to maintain that lead in China is closing fast. Several mainland firms are improving process technology and pushing toward top-tier chips that can run large AI models without U.S. hardware.
Huang’s concern is reinforced by his earlier appearance on FOX Business in late November, where he warned that access to Chinese buyers is vital for long-term U.S. AI competitiveness. He said the export restrictions have pushed Nvidia’s China sales to zero for two straight quarters. In his view, the U.S. innovation engine has always depended on enormous market returns, and losing China undermines that cycle.
Zhou Mi, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, explained this dynamic further in comments to the Global Times. He said the United States risks damaging the same economic structure that supports its technology leadership if it keeps stretching national-security rules across wider categories. According to him, an expanded security doctrine may rattle global supply chains in a way that weakens the base Washington says it wants to protect.
Trump, for his part, spoke only in brief lines about the meeting. When asked whether he had conveyed his stance on control rules directly to Huang, Trump responded, “He knows.” He also described Huang as a “smart man.”
Behind the scenes, Huang has also been trying to influence Congress. One idea under consideration earlier this year would have forced Nvidia to offer advanced chips to U.S. buyers first before seeking approval to sell to “countries of concern.” Nvidia resisted it, warning lawmakers that such requirements could harm the nation’s competitive position in global AI markets. For now, a similar restriction was kept out of major defense legislation.
Huang also delivered another message while meeting lawmakers. According to CNBC, he warned that state-level rulemaking in the U.S. could slow AI progress, since companies would need to navigate multiple compliance frameworks rather than a single federal standard.
Later that day, during an appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sought to calm speculation that Nvidia’s large data-center GPUs are being smuggled into restricted countries.
“A GPU for AI data centers, that GPU weighs two tons,” he said. “It has one and a half million parts. It consumes 200,000 watts. It costs $3 million.”
He added that anyone claiming mass smuggling of those systems would need to explain how entire shipments the size of a football field are crossing borders unseen.
The broader landscape around all of this is evolving quickly. Washington’s rules have already reshaped the global AI supply chain, and China’s fast-moving domestic chip race has become one of the biggest variables for 2025 and 2026. Nvidia still owns the high end of the market, but the danger for 2026 is that the company could exit China unintentionally, not through policy but through technological substitution. Beijing’s AI firms are motivated by both necessity and national ambition, and years of restricted access have forced them to accelerate their internal R&D pipelines.
At the same time, Chinese cloud providers are designing around Nvidia’s CUDA software advantages, building their own frameworks or investing in open-source alternatives. Once those systems mature, the lock-in power that elevated Nvidia over rivals such as AMD and Google could lose force. Huang appears aware of this shift and is pressing Washington to avoid creating conditions that push China’s market permanently out of reach.
The political mood in Washington has also hardened in ways that make an easy rollback unlikely. Trump has signaled that national-security concerns remain central to his thinking, and congressional committees across both parties are pushing for tighter oversight of AI hardware exports. For Nvidia, this means the timeline for clarity is uncertain, and each delay gives Beijing more time to scale homegrown options.
The stakes are high because Nvidia’s valuation depends heavily on demand for advanced AI accelerators. The U.S. market is huge, but China historically made up a significant share of data-center GPU revenue. With zero sales expected from there for two consecutive quarters, the pressure on Nvidia will only intensify.
The next year will show whether Washington softens its stance on H200 sales or doubles down. It will also show whether Chinese firms can move from prototypes to mass-market systems that compete directly with Nvidia’s constrained offerings.
However, Nvidia’s latest lobbying burst shows that the company sees this as a make-or-break moment. Huang’s blunt admission that he has “no clue” what China will accept underlines just how unpredictable the ground beneath the AI hardware market has become.