Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang told CNBC's Sara Eisen on Wednesday that the company has "largely conceded" China's artificial-intelligence chip market to Huawei, comments that pulled Nvidia shares lower in after-hours trading even as the company reported first-quarter revenue of $81.62 billion, authorized an $80 billion share buyback and raised its dividend.
Nvidia shares slipped more than 1 percent after the print. Asian suppliers that build, test and feed Nvidia's accelerator stack staged one of their biggest single-day rallies of the year on Thursday, led by a 19.85 percent jump in SoftBank Group that added more than $35 billion to its market value.
The China line
Revenue rose 85 percent from $44.06 billion a year earlier and beat the $78.89 billion LSEG consensus by nearly $3 billion. Second-quarter guidance of $91 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, ran roughly $4 billion above the Street. The dividend climbed to 25 cents a share from a penny.
"The demand in China is quite large," Huang told Eisen, adding that "Huawei is very, very strong" and had logged a record year. He said Nvidia has "largely conceded" the market, citing the strength of China's "local ecosystem of chip companies" around Huawei. China once accounted for at least one-fifth of Nvidia's data center revenue; there were no shipments of data center products to the country in the quarter, compared with $4.6 billion a year earlier.
Huang said Nvidia has told investors to "expect nothing" on Chinese approvals for its advanced chips. Reuters reported last week that Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com received Commerce Department clearance to buy Nvidia's H200 processor, but a U.S. trade representative said chip export controls were not on the agenda at last week's Trump-Xi summit. "We would be more than delighted to serve the market," Huang said.
On the Street
"Demand has gone parabolic," Huang said on the earnings call, citing agentic AI systems that generate large volumes of compute-intensive tokens. Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said hyperscaler and frontier model builders had shown "particularly strong" appetite for Nvidia's Blackwell GB300 NVL72 rack, calling it the fastest product ramp in company history. CNBC's Investing Club raised its price target on the stock to $260 from $230.
The supply chain
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing rose more than 2 percent in Thursday trading. Japan's Renesas Electronics closed 8.2 percent higher and Tokyo Electron jumped 5.9 percent. SK Hynix, which supplies high-bandwidth memory for Nvidia's accelerators, surged 11.2 percent. Samsung Electronics added 8.5 percent, helped by news of a tentative pay deal that eased fears of a strike. Chip-test maker Advantest gained 4.4 percent. SoftBank's move reflected its stakes in Arm Holdings and OpenAI, which generated about $45 billion of paper gains for the Japanese conglomerate in the fiscal year ended March.
Counterpoint
Today's file draws solely from CNBC center-lean reporting. Skeptical and China-perspective voices — analysts questioning hyperscaler capex, reporting on Huawei's Ascend roadmap, and bear-case views on customer concentration — are not represented. Huang supplied the only caveat the wires recorded: Nvidia's guidance assumes zero China revenue, and any reopening would be pure upside.
The next test is the Vera Rubin generation, which Kress said is expected to launch in the third quarter and ramp through the first quarter of next year.