Nvidia ships first H200 chips to China, but expects no data-centre revenue from them

Nvidia shipped its first H200 processors to China under a new US licensing scheme, and they accounted for less than 1% of $89B in quarterly data centre revenue. Its $108B forecast for the current quarter assumes no data centre computing revenue from China at all.

Nvidia has started shipping H200 processors to China and told investors to expect nothing from it. The chips went out in the quarter to 26 July under a new US licensing scheme, and accounted for less than 1% of $89B in data centre revenue.

The forecast is the part worth reading twice. Nvidia expects $108B in the current quarter and assumes no data centre computing revenue from China at all.

Jensen Huang says even that is being held back. “The unconstrained growth would be a lot higher,” he said, putting real demand well above the 70% figure the company has guided for next year.

Read from here, the numbers land differently. A single supplier can write the world’s second-largest economy out of its forecast and still guide up by roughly a fifth.

Europe’s answer is seven buildings. The Commission has opened bidding on up to seven AI gigafactories at €30B, split roughly €10B public and €20B private.

About €1B of the public share is actually committed. The rest depends on the next long-term budget, which a Commission official pointedly declined to pre-empt.

Set those figures beside each other. Nvidia books roughly a billion dollars of data centre revenue a day, so the money Europe has firmly committed to seven gigafactories is about a day of its supplier’s sales.

Each site is meant to house at least 100,000 advanced chips. Every one of them will be bought on the open market from the company that just guided $108B.

The prices are moving the wrong way for a buyer. Nvidia has told customers that server prices rise by more than 15% from early next year.

The schedule does not help either. Construction is due to start in early 2027 with the first sites running by mid-2028.

TNW has argued that the sovereignty framing around all this is thin. Renting the same silicon from a European address is an illusion of independence rather than the thing itself.

So the H200 story is really about leverage. Nvidia can lose a market the size of China and grow, and Europe is negotiating for buildings it has not yet funded, with chips it does not make.