The Surrender

The Surrender Jensen Huang just admitted what everyone already knew: Nvidia has lost China. "We've really largely conceded that market to them," the Nvidia CEO told CNBC. "Them" is Huawei — the company America tried to kill with export controls. Instead, those very controls handed Huawei the keys to the world's most valuable AI market. The best way to destroy your enemy is sometimes to arm them. China once accounted for at least one-fifth of Nvidia's data center revenue. That's gone. Every dollar of it, every chip, every relationship — evacuated because Washington decided that advanced semiconductors were too dangerous to share with the world's second-largest economy. Huang flew to Beijing in May. He met with Trump. He begged for permission to sell H200 chips to Chinese customers. The answer? Ten companies got approved. Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com — the usual suspects. But here's the twist: those ten companies had already moved on. They'd already built their AI infrastructure around Huawei's Ascend chips. The approval came, but the market had already moved on. And here's the part that should terrify every American tech executive: Huawei's Ascend 910C is actually catching up. DeepSeek's own tests show it reaching 60-80% of Nvidia H100 performance. Not world-class, but good enough for most AI workloads. And at roughly $2,800 per chip versus $25,000-$35,000 for an H100, the economics are suddenly very compelling for Chinese companies.