Nvidia shares soar as Trump fuels hopes of China Blackwell sales

NVIDIA’S shares extended their dramatic ascent to a record after US President Donald Trump said he will discuss the chipmaker’s Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) processors with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“We’ll be speaking about Blackwell,” Trump said on Wednesday (Oct 29), ahead of his highly anticipated meeting with Xi later this week.

He touted the chip as “super duper” and said Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang recently brought a version of the accelerator to the Oval Office.

Trump said months ago that he would consider allowing Nvidia to export a downgraded version of its Blackwell processor to China.

That would mark a major win for the world’s biggest company by market value, a significant concession to Beijing, and an upheaval of Washington’s years-long campaign to curtail China’s prowess in AI.

The president’s comments fuelled investor hopes that such a deal might be on the table this week, as Trump looks to strike a sweeping accord with Beijing, and ratchet down weeks of escalating trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Nvidia’s shares extended gains to 8.5 per cent in Asian trading on the alternative platform Blue Ocean.

Trump’s comments added to an earlier 6.8 per cent boost from a flurry of developments that underscored growing optimism around the global AI infrastructure boom.

These included earnings that exceeded even lofty expectations, Nvidia’s own bullish outlook for chip demand, and a spate of deals the company announced during a high-profile conference in Washington this week.

Access to China

But perhaps most crucial to investors is whether Nvidia gains increased access to China, the world’s largest market for its products, and an increasingly sophisticated developer of chips and AI in its own right.

Nvidia has faced an effective ban on selling its best AI hardware to customers in the Asian country since 2022. Restrictions were imposed over fears that those semiconductors could lend Beijing a military edge.

Huang has said those rules, which US policymakers ratcheted up several times, have driven Nvidia’s market share in China from a 95 per cent peak to zero.

The tech chief is among the most vocal opponents of the measures, which he argues have fuelled the rise of China’s own chipmaking capabilities, exemplified by the likes of Huawei Technologies.

There is also a lot of money at stake for a company that has already benefited more than anyone from runaway spending on AI computing.

Earlier this year, Nvidia wrote down billions in anticipated revenue after the Trump administration imposed restrictions on sales of its less-advanced H20 processor, designed specifically for the China market.

Mere months later, Trump agreed to issue permits for Nvidia to ship H20 chips to China in exchange for a 15 per cent cut of the revenue – an arrangement that fuelled widespread alarm from China hawks in and outside of his administration.

But those H20 sales have not actually happened. Beijing has discouraged Chinese companies from using the accelerators, part of a long-running effort to boost the homegrown ecosystem.

“The president has licensed us to ship to China, but China has blocked us from being able to ship to China,” Huang told reporters at this week’s company event in Washington. “They’ve made it very clear that they don’t want Nvidia to be there right now.”

Demand for Nvidia’s processors

Chinese companies, however, still covet the company’s processors and rely on Nvidia’s broader software ecosystem.

Access to even better hardware from the Blackwell lineup – now the industrial standard used by the likes of Meta Platforms and OpenAI – would be a significant boon to the Asian country’s AI ecosystem.

A major question, though, is how that jives with Beijing’s priorities. At the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee meeting last week, leaders pressed for greater self reliance in advanced technology, especially in the areas of semiconductors and AI.

Both Trump and Huang have suggested that they will also see each other in Asia this week, though it is unclear when, and uncertain whether, such a meeting may occur.

“Jensen, who’s an incredible guy, might be here,” Trump said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in South Korea. “Somebody said he’s here.” BLOOMBERG