By Aditi Ganguly
Publication Date: 2026-05-25 19:45:00
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President Donald Trump confirmed Friday what Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) investors have been quietly worrying about for months. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One after a two-day summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said Beijing has refused to approve purchases of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips, and the reason is straightforward.
“They have a much higher level than H200. China needs it and yeah it came up,” Trump said (1). “They choose not to buy because they want to develop their own. I think something could happen on that.”
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Nvidia stock fell 4.4% last Friday, giving back the all-time high it had touched a day earlier on news that the U.S. Commerce Department had approved the sale. For investors trying to read where Nvidia’s China revenue is heading, this week was supposed to be a turning point.
Instead, it now looks like confirmation that the turning point has already passed.
What actually happened
Reuters had recently reported that the Commerce Department had cleared roughly 10 Chinese firms — including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com — to purchase up to 75,000 H200 chips each through approved distributors like Lenovo and Foxconn (2). At current pricing, that ceiling caps initial sales at roughly $15-$20 billion in revenue (3). KeyBanc analyst John Vinh has modeled total Chinese demand at around 1.5 million units…