Nvidia’s Two Theaters: Robot Chips in Tokyo and a Carefully Controlled China Thaw
Published on 07/16/2026 at 10:33 | Redaktion boerse-global.de
The week’s headlines out of Nvidia could hardly be more different. In Tokyo, Jensen Huang was playing the role of grateful pioneer, thanking a former Sega president for a $5 million investment that saved the company in the late 1990s. In Washington, the company’s H200 AI chips were at the centre of a political spat, with a commerce official calling their shipment to China “trivial” and a congressman accusing the administration of dodging questions.
Both stories belong to the same underlying reality: Nvidia’s stock is methodically climbing toward its record high, even as geopolitics and new product cycles pull the company in multiple directions.
By Wednesday’s close the shares stood at €185.24, a whisker above their 50-day moving average of €181.91. The 14-day RSI of 57.6 remains in neutral territory despite a weekly gain of 4.4%, and the stock now sits just 8.5% below the 52-week peak of €202.50 hit in mid-May. On a trailing 12-month basis the advance is 25.8%, with year-to-date returns at 14.98%.
The steady upward drift is all the more notable for taking place against a backdrop of unresolved China tensions. A few days earlier – at a July 14 congressional hearing – Jeffrey Kessler, the US Commerce Department official responsible for industry and security, confirmed that a small number of H200 chips have been shipped to China after receiving individual security clearances. He described the volume as “trivial” and declined to give specifics on quantities or buyers.
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That vague answer provoked sharp criticism from Republican Representative Bill Huizenga, who accused Kessler of running a “goddamn circular firing squad” over a May Commerce directive that, in his view, left open a loophole allowing overseas subsidiaries of Chinese firms to obtain Nvidia’s more advanced Blackwell chips. The controversy underscores just how sensitive every step of Nvidia’s China engagement has become.
The numbers illustrate the scale of the disconnect. Chinese companies had placed orders for more than two million H200 chips for 2026, but Nvidia only had 700,000 units in inventory. To meet the early demand the company had to negotiate with TSMC to restart production of the older Hopper architecture. Kessler stressed that each export licence is decided on a case-by-case basis, with security reviews and inspections, and that some applications are simply rejected.
This is not a policy reversal, nor a reopening of the Chinese market as it existed before 2022, when Nvidia’s market share there collapsed from roughly 95% to near zero. Rather, it is a carefully choreographed loosening that began with a Trump administration announcement last December that H200 sales would be allowed subject to a 25% levy, followed by export licences early this year. Nvidia itself has long since stopped betting on China: since last year it excludes potential Chinese revenue from its forecasts entirely. CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC in May that he told investors to expect “nothing” from the region, making any sale a bonus rather than a built-in assumption.
While the political debate simmered in Washington, Huang was 6,000 miles away in Tokyo, unveiling a different kind of expansion. On July 15 the company introduced the T3000 and T2000 modules, built on the Thor architecture with Blackwell technology and aimed at the fast-growing market for humanoid and autonomous machines. The chips incorporate a memory optimisation that reduces memory requirements by as much as 15 gigabytes, allowing more complex AI applications on compact, low-power systems. Amazon Robotics and Boston Dynamics are already using the new hardware, and the Chinese firms UBTech and Agile Robots are also early partners.
Alongside the hardware, Nvidia is building a custom AI ecosystem for Japan using its open “Nemotron” models and data libraries. Japanese companies, research institutes and startups are developing their own applications tailored to the Japanese language and the country’s demographic challenges. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Toyota feature among the most prominent partners; with Toyota, Nvidia is expanding an existing collaboration to focus on smart cities and autonomous factories.
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The personal note came at a fan event in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, where Huang publicly thanked former Sega president Shoichiro Irimajiri for a $5 million investment in the late 1990s that, according to Huang, kept Nvidia from going under when its GPU development was in deep trouble.
On the charts, the stock’s recent behaviour suggests a market that has learned to live with geopolitical uncertainty. The 30-day annualised volatility of 37.75% remains elevated – a reminder that Washington headlines can still move the shares sharply in either direction. But the RSI is balanced, the 50-day average is trending gently higher, and the stock is within single digits of its all-time high. For now, investors seem to be pricing in two distinct Nvidia stories: one that carefully manages a token China channel license by license, and another that pushes deeper into robotics, autonomous systems and Japan’s industrial digitalisation. The question is which one will drive the next leg of the rally.
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