After more than a year of regulatory freeze, Nvidia is back in the China game — and this time, the receipts are real.
At GTC 2026 in San Jose this week, CEO Jensen Huang dropped what he called “new news”: Nvidia has received purchase orders from Chinese customers for its H200 processors and is actively restarting manufacturing. “Our supply chain is getting fired up,” Huang told reporters. Translation: the world’s most valuable company just unlocked access to the world’s second-largest AI market.
The backstory matters. China once accounted for at least 20% of Nvidia’s data center revenue before the Trump administration slapped export restrictions on the company last April. Nvidia took a $5.5 billion charge. For months, even after President Trump reversed course in December and allowed H200 sales (with a 25% government cut), nothing actually moved. Security scrutiny from both Washington and Beijing kept the pipeline frozen.
Now it’s thawing fast. Chinese authorities have reportedly approved ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to collectively purchase over 400,000 H200 units. Nvidia had already wound down Hopper-class production to focus on its next-gen Blackwell architecture, but Chinese demand is significant enough that they’re spinning the old line back up.
There are strings attached, of course. A 50% volume cap relative to U.S. domestic sales. Mandatory third-party testing on every shipment. And the government’s 25% revenue cut. But even with those constraints, the math is compelling. Nvidia guided 77% revenue growth this quarter — and explicitly assumed zero China data center revenue. If H200 orders materialize at scale, that guidance looks conservative.
Here’s the bigger picture: Nvidia just reported its 11th straight quarter of 55%+ growth, even while locked out of China entirely. The China revenue is pure upside on an already monstrous growth trajectory. Wall Street hasn’t fully priced it in because, until this week, nobody believed the orders were actually coming.
Now they are. And the supply chain is getting fired up.
