Jensen Huang continues to talk about the one thing going wrong for Nvidia, and investors sure seem to hate that
Last week was rough for Nvidia in no small part because CEO Jensen Huang continued to talk about perhaps the one thing that isn’t going well for the $4 trillion company: China.
The chip designer dropped more than 9% in the middlelast threefour days of the week, its biggest such tumble since April 7, the three sessions that followed President Donald Trump’s Rose Garden tariff announcements on April 2.
“Currently, we are not planning to ship anything to China,” Huang said on Friday while in Taiwan, per Reuters. As it relates to Blackwell chips, this is the equivalent of us saying that we have no plans to ship raw elephant ivory tusks to Canada. For starters, we don’t have any, and secondly, it wouldn’t be legal.
On the H20 side, China simply does not want the nerfed chips; or more precisely, policymakers are not allowing their tech champions to act upon any potential desire to get their hands on those GPUs. As Huang noted, the ball is in China’s court here.
It’s not clear that analysts were ever expecting much of a pickup in Nvidia’s China business, even after export restrictions on the H20 were lifted.
Huang also further watered down his stance on the state of the AI race after the Financial Times reported that he said, “China is going to win the AI race,” earlier this week.
The Takeaway
Reading between the lines here, the key bit are the facts that were left unsaid at the end of that remark: “China is going to win the AI race” — without having access to Nvidia’s flagship processors, or even wanting its nerfed chips.
Not exactly a signal that Nvidia’s hardware is as all-important and synonymous with success in AI as its stock price and revenue trajectory would suggest it is!
Not to get too deep into the sausage-making process of news here, but when an outlet as credible and prestigious as the FT is putting quotes around words and attributing them to the leader of the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, one personally feels fairly confident that those words were actually said.
“That’s not what I said,” Huang said, per Reuters. “What I said was that China has very good AI technology. They have many AI researchers.” Sure thing, boss. After all, it’s Nvidia’s economy — we’re just living in it.