NVDA Stock Gains In Premarket: CEO Jensen Huang Says China Chip Export Ban ‘Largely Backfired’

• "In China, we have now dropped to zero," said Huang, referring to the company’s server sales in the country.
• Huang spoke in a panel organized by the Special Competitive Studies Project.
• Nvidia stock declined nearly 5% last week, with traders eying President Donald Trump’s visit to China next week as a potential catalyst.

Nvidia Corp. shares rose 0.5% in early premarket trading on Monday, after a dull week that saw the AI chip giant’s market capitalization drop below $5 trillion.

Over the weekend, a panel discussion featuring CEO Jensen Huang was published, in which he outlined Nvidia’s setbacks in China and warned that U.S. export curbs could, in fact, prove counterproductive.

"In China, we have now dropped to zero," said Jensen Huang in an interview with the Special Competitive Studies Project, a bipartisan initiative by American lawmakers aimed at ensuring long-term competitiveness of the U.S. 

"Conceding an entire market the size of China probably does not make a lot of strategic sense, so I think that has already largely backfired. Maybe it made sense at the time, but I think the policy really needs to be dynamic and needs to stay with the times. I think it would be fairly safe to say that having American chip companies and other companies in China makes a lot of sense." 

NVDA’s China Problem

Nvidia for months has been trying to get a broad agreement going that would allow the company to resume sales of its AI semiconductors in the markets. Although the U.S. approved Nvidia server sales to Chinese customers earlier this year, a similar nod from Beijing is pending. 

Huang had earlier said that Nvidia restarted production for China-market chips, but shipments had faced hurdles, with reports suggesting potential delays due to Chinese import regulations.

Beijing has reportedly urged Chinese tech firms to back domestic suppliers and restrict Nvidia chip use to overseas operations, while U.S. rules require those chips to be used only within China, together effectively blocking customs clearance for H200 shipments.

In this period, local Chinese producers have gained ground. Huawei is set to capture the largest share of China’s AI chip market, with revenue projected to jump to $12 billion from $7.5 billion in 2025, driven by strong demand for its domestically produced chips, the Financial Times reported.

In the SCSP panel, Huang warned that, even without leading AI GPUs and software stacks developed in America, China remains a formidable competitor in frontier AI models.

"American companies win around the world," Huang said. "The argument there is that across the five-layer cake, there's one particular layer that is too important because in the others, China can get ahead. They have cheaper energy. They have incredible talent. So, they [have] the number of science and math experts, and as a result of that, the number of AI researchers in China is quite extraordinary, it's one of their national treasures."

Huang argued that conceding a market of that scale would accelerate China's push toward self-sufficiency, while continued American participation in that market would help extend the global reach of the American AI technology stack.

NVDA Stock Tracks Lower; Trump’s China Visit In Focus

NVDA shares declined nearly 5% last week, their worst weekly drop in two months. The move was noteworthy, coming in the same week when Big Tech cloud companies – which are Nvidia’s biggest customers – reported blowout results. Year to date, the NVDA stock is still up 6.4%.

On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment for NVDA shifted slightly lower in the ‘extremely bullish’ zone over the weekend.

An upcoming catalyst is President Donald Trump’s visit to China and his meeting with President Xi Jinping. The visit, initially planned for March, was rescheduled to May 14-15 due to the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran. 

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