Nvidia gains fresh access to a huge AI market

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang says China’s fast‑growing open‑source AI market is helping drive the worldwide boom in the technology and that his company is ready to ship fresh supplies of the H20 chips to China.

Speaking on Wednesday at the opening of the China International Supply Chain Expo, the co-founder of the California chip designer praised LLMs from mainland firms such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, MiniMax, Baidu, and Tencent. 

He called the models “world-class” and noted they were shared openly despite being developed in China, adding that such sharing had sped up AI progress all over the world.

Huang said the open‑source AI in China was acting as “a catalyst for global progress” and was giving “every country and industry a chance to join the AI revolution”. 

The expo, which runs through Sunday in Beijing, marked his third trip to the Chinese capital this year. Instead of his more usual leather jacket, Huang appeared as the guest of honor in a business suit. 

H20 chip sales in China will start soon

Nvidia is preparing to restart sales of its H20 GPUs. This line of processors has been tailored for China. The company has already received word from Washington that export licenses would be approved. In a Tuesday statement, the company said the H20 was less powerful than its flagship accelerators but met U.S. trade rules.

“I’m very happy that the export control has been lifted on H20 so that we can serve the market,” Huang said in an interview later that day.

Soon after Nvidia’s notice, Tencent confirmed it was applying to buy the chips, Reuters reported. ByteDance, owner of TikTok, said a similar report about its own application was “not accurate”.

The chip maker also plans to introduce a new RTX PRO graphics card for China, saying the part will fit digital‑twin uses in smart factories.

Nvidia has gained fresh access to a huge AI market

Gaining fresh access to China, one of the world’s largest spenders on AI, is timely for Nvidia. Bank of America expects AI funding in the country to jump 48 percent this year to about US$98 billion. Nvidia, which recently crossed the US$4 trillion mark in market value, stands to benefit from that surge, while Chinese developers gain quicker access to high‑end computing power.

In January, Nvidia’s shares briefly fell 17 percent when the launch of DeepSeek highlighted how efficiently some Chinese teams could train large language models. The stock has since rebounded, and the company’s market capitalization again rose past US$4 trillion.

Huang reminded the audience on Wednesday that over 1.5 million Chinese developers are building Nvidia’s platforms. He credited researchers, programmers, and entrepreneurs for what he called the country’s “super‑fast innovation”.

Looking ahead, Huang predicted that in the next 10 years, the most advanced factories in China will rely on AI and robots rather than human workers for dangerous or repetitive tasks. Automation and ML, he said, will become as basic to industry as electricity or the internet.

“Today, AI is fundamental infrastructure,” he told the expo audience. “It is revolutionizing the supply chain, changing how we build and move things.” 

He added that a large number of Chinese projects are using Nvidia’s Omniverse to create digital twins, to fine‑tune and design warehouses and factories before physical construction.

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