H200 Gains Narrow China Clearance

NVIDIA is at a crossroads: the U.S. just cleared sales of its H200 AI chips to about 10 Chinese firms, reviving hope for a China revenue comeback. Jensen Huang says China could open up “over time” and still pegs it as a $50 billion market, but Beijing hasn’t actually greenlit purchases yet. The stakes are huge—if approvals stay narrow, NVIDIA regains valuable sales without handing over its latest tech, but has to juggle global supply and keep Wall Street happy on earnings day.

But here’s the catch: chips keep leaking into China through backchannels. Despite tighter U.S. enforcement and hefty penalties—including more than $400 million in recent export control cases—demand is so strong that smuggling networks persist. If legal sales open up, some gray market activity could shift aboveboard, but NVIDIA and its partners still face mounting compliance costs and reputational risk if anything slips through.

Meanwhile, NVIDIA isn’t standing still. With a fresh $3 billion equity option and new partnerships, it’s investing in Corning’s multicore optical fiber to speed up data center connections and strengthen its ecosystem. The real bottleneck? High-bandwidth memory, not cables. This episode draws on reporting from Reuters, Bloomberg, and TechRepublic.

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