Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang erupted at U.S. chip export restrictions during a closed-door media roundtable at Computex 2025, calling the Biden-era rules “a failure” that slashed the company’s China market share in half and forced a multibillion-dollar write-off of unsellable H20 GPUs.
What Happened: “Export control was a failure,” Huang said, pointing to internal estimates that Nvidia’s share of the Chinese data-center market fell from “nearly 95%” in 2021 to “only 50%” today, according to a transcript of the Computex Q&A session published by Tom’s Hardware. He added that “export controls resulted in us writing off multiple billions of dollars… The write-off of H20 is as big as many semiconductor companies.”
The CEO stressed that the curbs did not stop Chinese firms from innovating: “If they don’t have enough Nvidia, they will use their own! …the local companies are very, very talented and very determined.”
Huang also cheered Washington’s U-turn on a sweeping licensing scheme that would have capped AI-chip sales to dozens of U.S. allies. “I think it’s really a great reversal of a wrong policy,” he said of the Trump team’s rollback.
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The H20 inventory charge, disclosed in April filings, totaled roughly $5.5 billion and wiped out potential China sales estimated at $15 billion. Nvidia now values next year’s mainland AI-hardware market at “$50 billion… It would be a shame not to be able to enjoy that opportunity, to bring home tax revenues to the United States, [and] create jobs.”
Why It Matters: To stay within U.S. limits, Nvidia is rushing lower-spec Blackwell-based accelerators for China that swap costly HBM for GDDR7 and stay under the bandwidth cap, with production slated for June. The company has also told Chinese cloud giants it can ship a downgraded H20 as early as July.
Talk of the rollback has already lifted semiconductor shares. Still, rival Huawei’s Ascend 910B is clawing share, adding weight to Huang’s warning that “AI researchers there are so good, and they’re going to build amazing AI no matter what.”
Price Action: Nvidia shares closed lower by 1.16% to $131.29 on Friday, according to Benzinga Pro.
Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings shows that Nvidia had a stronger price trend over the short, medium, and long term. Its momentum ranking was solid, however, its value ranking was poor at the 6.61th percentile. The details of other metrics are available here.
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