Nvidia just reported record Q2 revenue of $46.7 billion, up 56% year-over-year, alongside $26.4 billion in net income. Growth was spearheaded by data center demand, with its Blackwell chips alone driving $27 billion in sales. However, regulatory uncertainty left the company with zero sales of its China-focused H20 chip to Chinese customers.
Nvidia and AMD just agreed to pay the U.S. government 15% of their revenue from AI chip sales to China. President Donald Trump said he originally demanded 20% before Jensen Huang negotiated a 5% discount. The deal walks back recent bans on chips like the H20 and opens the door for a trimmed-down Blackwell model to enter China.
Donald Trump just revealed he initially planned to break up Nvidia after learning about its near-monopoly, but backed off after an advisor warned it would take rivals a decade to catch up. Jensen Huang later won him over in person, convincing the administration to let Nvidia sell H20 chips to China.
Nvidia just applied to resume sales of its H20 AI chips to China after securing U.S. government assurances, reversing an export ban from April. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed the move is tied to a deal on Chinese rare earth shipments. Chinese tech giants are already scrambling for stock, though U.S. lawmakers are pushing back hard.
Nvidia is designing yet another round of compliant AI processors for China after Washington effectively barred its H20 GPUs, forcing a $5.5B inventory charge. The chipmaker has already briefed Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance on its new roadmap. Why it matters: With Huawei ramping up mass shipments of its Ascend 910C to local tech giants, Nvidia is racing against time to prevent its China data center revenue from crashing to zero.
Chinese tech giants including Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance are reportedly ramping up orders for Nvidia H20 chips to keep up with DeepSeek's low-cost models. While investors initially feared efficient models would gut hardware demand, heavy inference usage across sectors like healthcare and education is driving massive server orders instead.
