SemiAnalysis: Nvidia is set to sell $12B worth of H20 chips, or 1M+ units, in China in 2024; Huawei expects to sell ~550K units of its Ascend 910B chips in 2024
firm to sell over one million sanctions-compliant HGX H20 in 2024 Luke Jones / WinBuzzer : NVIDIA's AI Chip Revenue in China to Hit $12 Billion Despite US Restrictions Anusuya Lahiri / Benzinga : Is Nvidia Defying US Export Controls? What's Going On? Business Plus : Nvidia Beats US Restrictions To Sell $12bn Of Chips To China Leah Montebello / This is Money : Nvidia beats U.S. restrictions to sell £9bn of chips to China Chris Murithi / Cryptopolitan : Nvidia to sell AI chips worth $12B in China Vince Condarcuri / TipRanks Financial : Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) to Sell $12B Worth of AI Chips in China Emily Jarvie / Proactive : NVIDIA on track to generate $12B from AI chip sales in China Forums: r/wallstreetbets : Nvidia to make $12bn from AI chips in China this year despite US controls r/NVDA_Stock : Nvidia to make $12bn from AI chips in China this year despite US controls BeauHD / Slashdot : Nvidia Forecasted To Make $12 Billion Selling GPUs In China
Context & Ripple Effects
The estimates put a large sanctions-compliant Nvidia product alongside a meaningful domestic Huawei alternative, showing that China’s AI-compute market was being served by both imported and locally designed accelerators rather than by a single supply channel.
The story also sits at the start of a policy-sensitive arc: later coverage describes new licensing requirements for some AI-chip sales to Chinese customers and Nvidia’s subsequent plan to resume H20 sales as part of trade negotiations. That makes the reported 2024 volumes a useful baseline for how much demand had accumulated in the compliant segment.
First-order effects
- Nvidia’s H20 line can preserve a sizable China revenue channel within the then-applicable export rules, while Chinese buyers gain access to a high-volume AI-compute option.
- Huawei’s projected Ascend 910B shipments give domestic customers a second scaled source of AI accelerators and make Huawei a more consequential alternative for workloads that can use its platform.
Second-order effects
- Chinese cloud providers, model developers, and system builders must weigh Nvidia availability and software compatibility against the supply assurance and domestic alignment offered by Huawei, encouraging multi-vendor procurement.
- The volume implied for H20s supports continued demand for the surrounding AI-server stack—systems, networking, memory, and integration—while Huawei’s shipments pull part of that demand toward its own ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If export-compliant products continue to reach China at scale, controls may shift competition toward defining the performance boundary of permissible chips rather than fully separating the two markets.
- Repeated policy changes and China’s domestic-equipment push could make supply sovereignty a lasting design criterion for Chinese AI infrastructure, even where foreign accelerators remain available.
The trend: AI infrastructure is fragmenting into policy-defined product tiers, with domestic alternatives gaining importance wherever access to leading foreign compute is uncertain.