Source of this article: Titanium Media APP

Author: Lin Zhijia

Edited by Hu Runfeng

▎This is the first time in the 26 years since Nvidia entered China that Huang has put on a suit to meet Chinese officials. Nvidia exclusively responded to Titanium Media AGI on the evening of April 17: "We regularly meet with government leaders to discuss our company's products and technologies. ”

The current situation is too difficult for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Six months ago, Nvidia was the leader of the U.S. economy in the eyes of investors, not only with profits and stock prices soaring, but also as one of the most valuable technology companies in the world when it comes to AI chips.

But now, Huang and his Nvidia face a "nightmare" brought to companies by the U.S. tariffs on China, where the Trump administration has asked Nvidia to ban H20 chips on China "indefinitely" in the future, resulting in a loss of about $5.5 billion (about 40 billion yuan) in quarterly revenue. According to estimates, since the beginning of the year, Nvidia's market value has evaporated by more than 6 trillion yuan.

And Huang's response was to cross the Pacific to China.

On April 17, Huang took off his classic leather jacket and donned a suit to visit Beijing, where he held talks with Ren Hongbin, president of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. Huang bluntly said that the U.S. government's tightening of chip export controls has had a significant impact on Nvidia's business, and he stressed that Nvidia will continue to optimize its product system that meets regulatory requirements and unswervingly serve the Chinese market.

On April 18, Huang visited Shanghai, where he bluntly stated that AI has great potential for development, and that countries should strengthen cooperation and sharing to promote common progress and world prosperity. The Chinese market is very important to NVIDIA, and NVIDIA complies with the laws of various countries, is committed to the Chinese market, and is committed to serving the Chinese market in the best possible way.

In addition, Nvidia further responded to Titanium Media AGI earlier: "We regularly meet with government leaders to discuss our company's products and technologies. ”

Clearly, Huang has made promises on both sides: Mar-a-Lago will leave $500 billion (more than $3.6 trillion) of AI infrastructure to be produced in the United States over the next four years, and the world's most powerful AI chips will be made in the United States for the first time, and in Beijing, he said Nvidia will "spare no effort" to continue castrating and selling compliant AI chips to China.

Regardless of the impact of this turmoil, this is the best ending for 62-year-old Huang, a billionaire who has been away from politics for many years.

U.S. President Donald Trump recently said, "Huang is a wonderful man, he has become my friend, and I have no worries about him at all." Trump stressed that there is "good" private communication between the United States and China, and he is optimistic that a deal will be reached. But he did not provide any specific details about the private trade talks between the United States and China.

Under the tariff storm

For the first time in 26 years, Huang learned how to "be a man."

Huang's whirlwind visit to China is of great significance.

While Nvidia says it has "regular" exchanges and is visiting China for the second time in three months this year, we don't remember the last time Huang met with Chinese officials.

According to the analysis of Google search and other methods, Titanium Media AGI believes that this may be the first time that Huang Jenxun has met with Chinese officials in a suit since Nvidia entered China 26 years ago.

As early as June 21, 2005, NVIDIA (Singapore) Co., Ltd. officially opened its Beijing representative office, located on the 29th floor of One World Trade Center.

At the time, Wen Zhenbang, NVIDIA's first head of China, then NVIDIA's general manager of sales in China, and now McAfee's managing director of Greater China, said that the representative office will be responsible for Nvidia's marketing, promotions, customer service and technical support in China, and will complement NVIDIA's existing offices and design centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Prior to this, NVIDIA's business in China was sold by Junzhao Company, and it has reached a cooperative relationship with Lenovo for more than ten years. At the same time, Nvidia also cooperates with local graphics card manufacturers to develop products specifically for Chinese consumers - this is also a unique sales model for Nvidia, Nvidia does not sell chips and graphics card products directly, but sells them externally through partners such as Gigabyte, Dell, and Colorful, except for large direct sales customers such as Alibaba.

On the opening day of NVIDIA's Beijing office, more than 400 guests not only witnessed this important moment, but also experienced a special event that NVIDIA China had not been open to the media in the past 30 years - a visit to the famous "520 Club" Internet café in Beijing at that time, and a wonderful game competition.

In the past 30 years, NVIDIA's employees in China have grown by nearly 4,000, an increase of nearly 56% in a few years, and it has branches and offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. And the employee turnover rate is very low, once you join NVIDIA, you don't leave easily, the annual turnover rate is only 0.9%.

According to the financial report, before the first round of export controls imposed by the U.S. Department of Commerce on China in 2022, Nvidia's quarterly revenue in China once reached $2.1 billion, but by 2023 and 2024, under the AI boom, except for a round of "retaliatory" sales revenue growth, it is almost in a "roller coaster" market of growth.

According to the financial report, in the 2024 calendar year ending in January, Nvidia's annual revenue in China was US$17.108 billion (about RMB 124.830 billion), the highest in history, an increase of 66% from US$10.306 billion in the previous year.

At the same time, in fiscal 2025, 53% of Nvidia's revenue will come from outside the United States, and China is Nvidia's second largest sales region: the United States ranks first with 47%, and Chinese mainland ranks second with 13%.

Yet, both in the United States and in China, Huang has had very little contact with political officials and has tried to stay away from political activism.

Stephen Witt, author of "Huang Jenxun: The Core of Nvidia," said that Huang is completely uninterested in politics, never stands up for any politician or solicits donations, never expresses any political opinions, and has never been a guest at Mar-a-Lago and was absent from Trump's inauguration.

At the same time, Titanium Media AGI also exclusively learned that Huang was invited to the White House only once seven months ago, and he has never attended a White House event. In China, in 2023 and 2024, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Commerce and other departments invited Huang to visit China many times, but he refused. Over the past three years, Apple CEO Tim Cook has met with more than a dozen Chinese officials.

Huang is more of an evangelist for technology and partners. Therefore, Nvidia hardly participates in any international exhibitions in China such as the CIIE, the CIFTIS, the Chain Expo, etc., and as Nvidia China becomes the direct management of the Asia-Pacific region, Nvidia still establishes the so-called "inner circle" in China.

Therefore, this may also be one of the important reasons why Huang's "groundbreaking" exchanges with Chinese officials in Beijing have been widely reported by CCTV and other countries.

Why did Huang join Cook in his first trip to Beijing and Shanghai for meetings with his Chinese counterpart for the first time in nearly 30 years? There are three main reasons behind this:

1. China is conducting an anti-monopoly investigation against NVIDIA. In December 2024, the State Administration for Market Regulation issued a document stating that the State Administration for Market Regulation launched an investigation into NVIDIA in accordance with the law for allegedly violating the Anti-Monopoly Law of the People's Republic of China and the Announcement of the State Administration for Market Regulation on Approving the Anti-Monopoly Review Decision of NVIDIA in the Case of Approval of Nvidia's Acquisition of the Equity of Milestones Technology Co., Ltd. with Additional Restrictive Conditions (Announcement [2020] No. 16 of the State Administration for Market Regulation). Overnight, Nvidia's market value evaporated by $88.9 billion (about 646 billion yuan).

2. Under U.S. tariffs and export controls, Nvidia not only has a lot of revenue, but also loses Internet giant customers and supply chain companies such as Alibaba and Tencent. According to Bloomberg estimates, with the inability of H20 to sell to China, Nvidia may lose $14 billion to $18 billion in revenue this year, while Nvidia's revenue in China last year was only more than $170, so it means that 20% of the revenue will be lost, and Alibaba, Tencent, Byte and other large manufacturers will no longer buy Nvidia's iterative AI chip products, which has a huge impact on Nvidia's long-term development.

3. The Chinese market is fiercely competitive and has many competitors, which affects NVIDIA's global hegemony. In November 2023, Huang said at a DealBook conference that the most critical and advanced technologies developed by Nvidia are not being provided to China, and restricting the export of high-end chips to China may have unintended consequences, and as many as 50 companies in China are currently developing technologies that can compete with Nvidia's products. China can find ways to acquire this technology or "incentivize" domestic chipmakers, noting that Nvidia is still 10 years ahead of these companies.

Huang stressed at the time that while the Biden administration's attempt to decouple China's chip supply from the U.S. "should definitely go ahead," it is unrealistic for the supply chain to be fully independent in the next 10 or 20 years.

Some analysts pointed out that if the United States continues to implement the current policy toughly, the share of some Nvidia products in the next five years may fall by as much as 30%.

With Trump taking office, in April this year, Huang made an exception for the company's future and growth, not only buying up to $1 million per person to meet with Trump, but also crossing the Pacific to China for interviews, hoping to strike a balance.

However, Huang miserpented.

Although Nvidia announced that it would invest heavily in manufacturing the most advanced AI chips and supercomputing clusters in the United States for the first time, and invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years with companies such as TSMC, Trump did not return the H20 deal to continue selling in China, but chose to sanction it.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Huang has not given up on the Chinese market. Nvidia has privately opposed any new restrictions and said China has been able to produce some chips of the same caliber as its "special version" H20.

There are reports that around April 10, Nvidia, which already knew the inside story, did not warn at least some of its major customers in advance, which ultimately led to many Chinese companies still expecting H20 chips to be delivered by the end of the year, unaware of the upcoming restrictions, and even Nvidia's China sales team was isolated from the information wall and did not seem to be notified before the announcement.

As soon as the news came out, Nvidia's stock price fell nearly 7% on April 16, and its market value evaporated by more than $1.88 trillion overnight.

Another semiconductor giant, AMD, also warned on April 16 that it expects to incur a cost loss of up to $800 million (accrued) due to the Trump administration's recent restrictions on the export of advanced chips to China.

The Wall Street Journal believes that the latest US action to contain China is partly related to the amazing breakthrough of China's DeepSeek to build a powerful model with low computing power. While these policy changes only affect a relatively small portion of the business of companies like Nvidia and AMD, they have dashed any hopes that it will be able to sell chips to China unhindered in the future, such as Nvidia's inability to tweak chip designs to bypass U.S. sales restrictions.

Three months ago, Huang traveled to China to attend the Nvidia China Annual Meeting, where he met with NVIDIA employees, startup founders and developers in Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai.

In the past three months, Nvidia's stock price has fallen by 1/4 (26%), and its market value has lost nearly $900 billion (about 6.57 trillion yuan), both the impact of DeepSeek on Nvidia's computing power narrative and Trump's tariff policy.

Shen Meng, executive director of Xiangsong Capital, analyzed that Nvidia is the representative enterprise most severely affected by the Sino-US trade war and technology war among American technology giants, and its AI chips are the areas where the United States wants to suppress China. Huang is the first U.S. tech company to head a U.S. technology company since the U.S.-China trade war broke out, and possibly the last in the near future to stabilize the market in Beijing. Shen Meng stressed that China will not be able to separate itself from Nvidia in the short term, and will work with Huang to find a solution; In the long run, if Chinese companies can make breakthroughs in high-end chip research through knowledge accumulation, the effect of the US export ban will be reduced.

The industry expects that after the latest restrictions on H20 exports by the Trump administration, Nvidia will continue to launch new inference chips that meet regulatory requirements and are specifically for the Chinese market.

But everyone still recognizes that Huang still hopes in his heart: Nvidia does not want to be a "pawn" in the tariff war between China and the United States.

CCTV commented that since the beginning of this year, Chinese AI companies have been born to DeepSeek, on the one hand, it shows that the United States' export ban on China's high-end chips has not achieved the purpose of restricting the development of China's AI industry; On the other hand, the Chinese market is huge, and the AI industry has broad prospects, which will create huge market demand for upstream chip companies at home and abroad. China is both a beneficiary and a contributor to economic globalization, and China's development is an opportunity for the world. "In the face of excessive U.S. tariffs, we are pleased to see global companies like Nvidia continue to deepen their presence in China."

The implementation of domestic AI chips has accelerated

Cambrian posted quarterly profit for the first time in five years

Citigroup analysts noted in an April 16 note that as Chinese cloud vendors initially planned to use H20 chips to meet 50% of AI accelerator demand in 2025, they may now turn to Huawei and Cambrian products as restrictions are introduced.

On the evening of April 18, Cambrian (SHA: 688256), a leading domestic AI chip company, released its financial report for the first quarter of this year, which attracted market attention.

Cambrian's financial report shows that in the first quarter of this year, the company achieved operating income of 1.111 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4230.22%, a surge of 42.3 times, a net profit of 355 million yuan, a year-on-year turnaround, a net loss of 227 million yuan in the same period last year, and a basic earnings per share of 0.85 yuan.

This is the first time that Cambrian has achieved quarterly profitability in five years since its listing. From 2021 to 2023, Cambrian's net losses were 825 million yuan, 1.257 billion yuan, and 848 million yuan, respectively. From 2017 to 2024, Cambrian has a cumulative loss of more than 5.6 billion yuan in 7 years.

Cambrian said in the financial report that during the reporting period, the company continued to expand the market and actively helped the implementation of AI applications, resulting in a significant increase in revenue during the reporting period compared with the same period last year.

It is worth noting that according to the analysis of the financial report, Titanium Media AGI believes that this year's Q1 Cambrian R&D investment is 235 million yuan, a year-on-year increase of about 38%, and if the current subsidy of 77 million yuan is added, the annual R&D investment is expected to exceed 1 billion yuan. At the same time, the financial report disclosed that as of Q1, the company's advance payment was 973 million yuan (including the wafer factory deposit), and the inventory hit a record high of 2.76 billion yuan, both of which increased by more than 30% over the same period last year.

This means that Cambrian's core business has begun to generate substantial profits, and its revenue, profit, and R&D have reached the highest level in history, which should be supported by large customers. It is reported that two domestic Internet giants bought Cambrian products in large quantities last year.

Founded in 2016, Cambrian focuses on AI chips, including cloud smart chips, acceleration cards and training machines and edge products, chips are used in cloud servers, data centers and other cloud, edge, and end fields, and the company's business also includes IP licensing and software, intelligent computing cluster system business.

In 2024, Cambrian's stock price will rise by 404.67%, becoming the largest increase in stocks on the Science and Technology Innovation Board. In 2025, the Cambrian stock price is up 3.70% year-to-date.

"Cambrian's benchmark is Nvidia." Some analysts believe that the market's pursuit of Cambrian may also reflect the market's expectations for domestic AI chips, superimposed with emotional blessings.

In fact, since Trump came to power, China's chip industry has changed dramatically.

On April 17, TSMC released its Q1 results, with revenue reaching NT$839.254 billion, a year-on-year increase of 41%; The net profit was NT$361.6 billion, compared with the previous estimate of NT$346.76 billion, an increase of nearly 60%. The company maintains its 2025 forecast unchanged, with full-year revenue growth in the range of 20%-30%.

In response to the impact of tariffs, TSMC Chairman and President Wei Zhejia mentioned that there has been no change in customer behavior at present, and the company will not adjust its full-year growth forecast due to tariff issues, but there are uncertainties and risks in the potential impact of tariff policies, and TSMC will continue to prudently observe changes and adjust its operating strategy. It is reported that by the end of 2024, the United States is TSMC's largest exporter, accounting for 60% of its total revenue, and Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, and AMD among the top five customers are all from the United States.

Affected by the off-season of smartphones, HPC (high-performance computing) has contributed more than "half of the country" to TSMC's performance, accounting for 59% of total revenue in the first quarter, which mainly includes the global AI infrastructure investment boom driven by the demand for AI training and AI inference.

According to industry analysts, the computing power investment of Chinese technology companies is growing faster and even more aggressive than that of the United States. Although China is also facing the risk of a computing power bubble, the risk of chip supply interruption is the first. Therefore, domestic AI chips are being replaced at an accelerated pace.

In particular, HUAWEI CLOUD released the CloudMatrix 384 super-node technology. Based on the DeepSeek-R1 model deployed in CloudMatrix 384, the inference performance of a single card can reach 1920 tokens/s, which is basically close to the H100 level.

For AI large model training, the performance of GPU computing power is crucial, which will be determined by the performance of large models. Therefore, the acceleration of the implementation of self-developed AI chips by Chinese companies is undoubtedly a "bad news" for NVIDIA, especially China's adherence to the strategy of scientific and technological self-reliance, and is breaking through the "stuck neck" dilemma with systematic institutional innovation, transforming the pressure of external technology blockade into endogenous innovation momentum, coupled with the US government's additional tariffs and semiconductor export controls, which continue to eat away at NVIDIA's sales layout in China.

Patrick Moorhead, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, a technology consulting and analysis firm, said: "This kills Nvidia's access to a key market where they will lose momentum in China." Eventually, Chinese companies will turn to Huawei. ”

Brady Wang, associate director of research at Counterpoint, said that the U.S. export restrictions on AI chips to China will change the geographical distribution of production and delay regional demand in the short term.

In February, it was reported that the Trump administration was enacting stricter restrictions on semiconductors and forcing key allies to increase restrictions on China's chip industry, signaling that the new U.S. administration would expand the technology restrictions imposed on China by the previous administration.

In response to Huang's visit to China, the Global Times said in an April 19 commentary that Huang's visit to China and his emphasis on the "crucial" Chinese market can be seen as an indirect resistance of U.S. companies to the U.S. government's protectionist policies, reflecting the call of the U.S. technology and business community to see China as an opportunity rather than a threat, and to cooperate rather than "decouple", which is very representative.

The article stresses that the hope of Sino-US relations lies in the people, the foundation lies in the people, the future lies in the youth, and the vitality lies in the localities. If the US insists on going its own way, continues to engage in tariff blackmail against China, and encourages the "decoupling" of China and the United States, the increasingly clear opposition from voters may become an unavoidable political reality in Washington.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian has responded that China has repeatedly stated its solemn position on the malicious blockade and suppression of China's semiconductor industry by the United States. The US has politicized, pan-securitized, and instrumentalized economic, trade, and technological issues, continuously increased export controls on chips to China, and coerced other countries to suppress China's semiconductor industry. This kind of behavior hinders the development of the global semiconductor industry, and will eventually eat itself and harm others.