"Our business in China has been a bit of a rollercoaster" - Nvidia CEO “disappointed” in further Chinese ban on buying its AI chips (www.techradar.com)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he’s “disappointed” after reports that China’s Cyberspace Administration has tightened restrictions on purchases of Nvidia’s H20 AI accelerators—chips Nvidia specifically produced for the Chinese market. Speaking in London, Huang framed the move as part of broader U.S.–China policy tensions, insisted H20s are commercial data‑center hardware (used for servers, gaming and laptops) rather than a national security threat, and noted Nvidia will keep engaging both governments. The announcement follows a separate preliminary anti‑monopoly probe by China’s State Administration for Market Regulation into Nvidia. The development matters because China is the world’s second‑largest AI compute market—Huang estimated ~$15 billion in demand—and restrictions on Nvidia hardware could reshape access to leading GPUs for model training and inference. Technically, limiting H20 imports may nudge Chinese organizations toward domestic accelerators or alternative supply chains, accelerating local chip development and competitive fragmentation in AI hardware. For global AI/ML, this is another sign of geopolitically driven technology decoupling: it can slow cross‑border collaboration, complicate hardware procurement for large-scale training, and influence where peak compute gets deployed. The combined regulatory pressure (export controls and antitrust scrutiny) makes Nvidia’s China business uncertain, even as demand for compute remains intense.