Nvidia (NVDA) stock is back in the news, this time mostly for pleasant reasons. Last week, the company’s market capitalization reached $4 trillion as it surpassed Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) to achieve that milestone. It’s been a dream rally for NVDA.
What makes the feat even more impressive is that Nvidia achieved it despite losing billions of dollars in quarterly revenue in China, due to the U.S. tightening restrictions on exports of high-end artificial intelligence (AI) chips to the country.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is headed to China and is set to hold a media briefing on Wednesday, July 16. Huang met President Donald Trump ahead of his visit, which would be his second this year. A bipartisan letter from U.S. senators has meanwhile requested the Nvidia CEO to “refrain from meeting with representatives of any companies that are working with the PRC’s military or intelligence establishment, are named on the Entity List, or are suspected to have engaged in activities that undermine export controls.”
China was once Nvidia’s second-biggest market and during the fiscal Q1 2026 earnings call in May, CFO Collete Kress said, “Losing access to the China AI accelerator market, which we believe will grow to nearly $50 billion, would have a material adverse impact on our business going forward and benefit our foreign competitors in China and worldwide.”
Nvidia’s China business has come to a screeching halt, and at the GTC Paris Financial Analyst Q&A Event last month, Huang stressed that the company is assuming zero revenues from China AI chip sales currently and called upon the analyst community to also do so in their models. Huang alluded to chip export controls being a bargaining ploy in U.S.-China trade talks while terming any upside from that eventuality as a “bonus.”
Huang said that Chinese competitors are a few years behind Nvidia, and NVDA’s AI chips have nearly 5 times more efficiency than Huawei’s. He, however, said, China can capitalize on lower power prices compared to the U.S. and use more domestic chips and increase the number of data centers that it is building.
Huang has built a case for allowing AI chip exports to China and has reiterated multiple times that the export ban is not helping and, if anything, it is simply spurring innovation in China.