Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told Bloomberg Television on Monday, May 18, that China will eventually open its market to U.S. AI chips. Speaking at a Dell Technologies event in Las Vegas, days after joining President Trump's delegation to Beijing, Huang put the decision squarely on Beijing. "The Chinese government has to decide how much of their local market do they want to protect," he said. "My sense is that over time the market will open."
That confidence has a ceiling. Trump's summit with Xi Jinping produced no immediate breakthrough for Nvidia. The H200 chip is now legally cleared for sale in China by Washington, yet not a single unit has shipped.
Huang Was in Beijing With Trump but Did Not Raise His Own Chips With China's Leaders
Huang joined Trump's May 14 and 15 summit in Beijing alongside Apple's Tim Cook and Tesla's Elon Musk. He was not originally on the White House guest list. According to Reuters, Trump picked him up in Alaska en route to Beijing, which immediately raised investor expectations that a deal on H200 chip sales was close.
However, it was not. When Bloomberg asked whether Huang raised the H200 directly with President Xi or Premier Li Qiang, he confirmed he did not. "I didn't discuss directly with them about H200," Huang said, adding that "President Trump had some conversations with the leaders." He said he is looking forward to seeing what Beijing decides.
The bottleneck is not on the U.S. side. The Commerce Department has already cleared around 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com, to purchase H200 chips, with each approved buyer permitted to purchase up to 75,000 units. No deliveries have started. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed the reason at a Senate hearing last month: "The Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they're trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry."
Nvidia Went From 95% of China's AI Market to Zero: Here Is What Is at Stake
The scale of what Nvidia stands to gain, or lose, makes this standoff one of the biggest unresolved stories in tech right now.
Before U.S. export restrictions began tightening in 2022, Nvidia controlled roughly 95% of China's advanced AI chip market. That share has since fallen down to zero. Huang confirmed it himself at a Citadel Securities event in October 2025 saying, "We went from 95% market share to 0%."
Chinese companies, including Huawei, Cambricon, Alibaba, and Baidu, have moved into that space with domestically built alternatives. Beijing's calculation is straightforward: allow Nvidia back in, and you undermine years of investment in homegrown chips. Nvidia's most advanced products, the Blackwell and forthcoming Rubin series, remain fully banned from China regardless of any deal on H200s.
Huang has previously described China as a $50 billion annual opportunity for Nvidia. Nvidia's own guidance for the current quarter assumes zero Data Center compute revenue from China.
Nvidia will report its fiscal first-quarter earnings on Wednesday, May 20, after the market closes. It will be Huang's first public opportunity to address the China situation since the Beijing summit, and Wall Street will be listening closely for any change to that zero forecast.
Washington has approved the sales, but Beijing has not approved the purchases. Until China decides that accessing the world's leading AI chips matters more than protecting its own semiconductor industry, Nvidia is locked out of a $50 billion market it cannot touch.
Wednesday's earnings call is the next moment to watch.
Damilare Odedina
