Nvidia CEO says "no active discussions" to sell Blackwell chips to China

Nvidia’s Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said there were "no active discussions" to ship its Blackwell chips to China.

The news comes amid speculation that Nvidia might be trying to stage its return to the largest semiconductor market, but Huang was quick to end any rumors.

“There’re no active discussions. Currently, we’re not planning to ship anything to China,” Huang said from Tainan, south of Taipei, according to Bloomberg.“It’s up to China when they would like Nvidia products to go back to serve the Chinese market. I look forward to them changing their policy, and hopefully we’ll be able to serve the Chinese market again.”

On Saturday, Huang shared with reporters at an event held by Nvidia's partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co that the company is experiencing "very strong demand" for its Blackwell chips.

"Nvidia builds the GPU (graphics processing units), but we also build the CPU (central processing units), the networking, the switches, and so there are a lot of chips associated with Blackwell," Huang said, according to Reuters.

During an interview that aired on Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes" program, Trump stated that only US customers should have access to Nvidia’s top-end Blackwell chips. He stressed that no one other than the US “will have them.”

Shortly before that, Nvidia announced plans to supply more than 260,000 Blackwell AI chips to South Korea and some of its biggest businesses, such as Samsung Electronics.

There were questions as to whether Trump would allow shipments of a scaled-down version of Blackwell chips to China, which he did not rule out.

However, the possibility of shipping any chips to China at all has drawn criticism from those who worry about potentially giving the country an advantage over the US military and AI capabilities.

For example, Republican Congressman John Moolenaar, said such a move "would be akin (to) giving Iran weapons-grade uranium."

In general, returning to the Chinese market with its more advanced products would offer Nvidia a $50 billion opportunity, Huang said during earnings in August, Bloomberg reports. The ongoing demand for AI technology there sets the market to grow at 50% a year.

As the situation unfolds, investors worry that the AI bubble is about to burst, with the market at risk of under-delivering on its revenue promise. This puts major capital spending on data centers and the Nvidia chips that run them into question.