Nvidia largely – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company has “largely conceded” China’s AI chip market to Huawei as U.S. export restrictions continue to reshape what can be sold. The admission comes alongside Nvidia’s strong earnings, an $80 billion share buyback plan, and a
Jensen Huang didn’t talk like a chief executive planning a quick comeback. In a media appearance that came right as Nvidia posted another record-breaking quarter, the company’s CEO said the opposite: Nvidia has “largely conceded” China’s artificial intelligence chip market to Huawei.
“The demand in China is quite large,” Huang told CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “Huawei is very, very strong. They had a record year, they’ll likely, very likely, have an extraordinary year coming up… because we’ve evacuated that market.”
Then came the blunt line that landed with force: “We’ve really largely conceded that market to them.”
The timing matters. Nvidia’s latest results showed a company still feeding the global AI rush at full speed. Revenue surged 85% to $81.62 billion from $44.06 billion a year earlier. Alongside that, Nvidia unveiled an $80 billion share buyback program and raised its dividend.
Yet China remains the flashpoint where that growth can’t simply be exported as-is.
Huang tied his comments to the continuing pressure from Washington’s tightening restrictions on advanced AI chip exports. The Chinese market once accounted for at least one-fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue. But after the Trump administration told Nvidia in April that it would need a license to export chips to China and to a handful of other countries. the company effectively found itself locked out.
In the same interview, Huang struck a careful tone about whether that could change soon. Nvidia had told investors to “expect nothing” regarding approvals to sell advanced chips into the country. He later reiterated the logic of that caution.
“I don’t have any expectation, which is the reason why we put all of our guidance, all of our numbers, all the expectations… to invest nothing, to expect nothing,” Huang said.
Still, he left the door open—just not with any timetable.
“We would be more than delighted to serve the market,” Huang said. “We have a lot of customers there, we have a lot of partners there, and we’ve been there for 30 years.”
That “if conditions improve” posture plays out against the backdrop of a political calendar that hasn’t delivered clarity. Huang was added last-minute to President Donald Trump’s China summit last week. but the visit didn’t settle the question of whether Nvidia’s H200 chips will be permitted in the country.
Last week, Reuters reported that some Chinese companies had received approval from the U.S. Commerce Department to purchase H200 chips, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com. Even so, a U.S. trade representative said chip export controls were not part of discussions during last week’s China talks—an indication that any meaningful easing of restrictions on H200 sales may remain distant.
For Nvidia, the challenge is now two-layered: keep delivering demand elsewhere while preparing for a China market that may be harder to win back.
Huang described Nvidia’s next phase as expansion beyond chips alone. He spoke about what he called the AI industry’s “five-layer cake” spanning energy, chips, infrastructure, models and applications. He also framed the company’s cash position as something that has to protect the whole pipeline.
“The idea of [a] many times larger company is not out of the question,” Huang said, adding that Nvidia was investing heavily across the broader opportunity tied to the AI economy.
When asked where the money would go first, Huang said Nvidia’s top priority was supporting suppliers amid surging demand.
“As we’re growing hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, we have to support our supply chain so that they are able to support our growth,” he said.
One paragraph in this story sums up the stakes: Nvidia can be booming financially while still watching a core market shift away in real time. Huang’s comments make the tension hard to miss—China may be large, but the rules that decide who gets to sell there are the rules that are changing fastest.
Nvidia Jensen Huang Huawei China AI chips export restrictions H200 data center revenue share buyback dividend AI semiconductor