China just stopped returning NVIDIA Corp's (NASDAQ:NVDA) calls. After years of being the world's biggest AI-chip growth engine, Beijing has effectively iced out the U.S. semiconductor giant — and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn't sugar-coating it.
"We went from 95% market share to 0% … we are 100% out of China," he admitted recently, adding that "in all our forecasts, we assume zero for China."
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For a market that once represented a major slice of Nvidia's data-center business, that's not a slowdown — that's a hard break-up.
Read Also: Nvidia Is Becoming The Operating System Of AI: ‘We Run Everything,’ Jensen Says
China Closes The Door
The message from Beijing has become increasingly blunt. In November, regulators reportedly banned foreign AI chips — including Nvidia — from new state-funded data center projects, requiring those less than 30% complete to swap out imported hardware entirely.
A month earlier, customs officials tightened scrutiny on semiconductor imports at major ports, making it harder to move Nvidia GPUs into the country at scale. And China's industrial policy is doubling down on domestic production, with plans to triple AI chip output by 2026 and new alliances designed to build a self-sufficient stack from silicon to software.
Layer in another twist: oversupply. Analysts say Chinese tech firms aggressively stockpiled Nvidia chips through official and gray-market channels during the export-curb panic.
Now, combined with rapidly improving domestic alternatives, China has more AI hardware than it needs for years. When shelves are full and nationalism is profitable, demand for new Nvidia shipments dries up fast.
Huang's Counterpunch: Think bigger
But Huang isn't playing the victim card. He's flipping the narrative — arguing that Nvidia doesn't need China to sustain the AI boom.
He recently projected that global AI infrastructure spending could reach $3 trillion–$4 trillion by the end of the decade, framing the opportunity as far larger than the Chinese market could have delivered even under ideal conditions. It's an audacious pivot: if China ghosts Nvidia, the rest of the world will pick up the phone.
The real investor question isn't whether Nvidia can survive a China blackout — it's whether the trillions-dollar AI build-out elsewhere will arrive fast enough to compensate. For now, the breakup is official.
The rebound? Still a maybe.
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