Investing.com-- NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) is planning to build a research and development center in Shanghai to help maintain its edge in China, the Financial Times reported on Friday, as the chipmaker grapples with more U.S. export controls.
CEO Jensen Huang discussed the plan with Shanghai’s mayor Gong Zheng when they met in the city last month, the FT report said, citing two people with knowledge of the matter. The company is currently leasing a new office space in Shanghai to accommodate existing employees.
The planned R&D center will research the requirements of Chinese customers, as well as the technical requirements needed to meet Washington’s strict export controls, the FT report said. But any actual core design and production will remain overseas.
China made up about 14% of Nvidia’s revenue in 2024, with Huang touting the country as a potential $50 billion market in the coming years. The Nvidia CEO had visited China in April.
Nvidia sold the H20 chip in China- a model with scaled-down performance that was in line with Biden-era export controls against Beijing. But the Trump administration in April unveiled even stricter restrictions on tech exports to China, which now block shipments of the current generation of H20 chips.
Earlier reports suggested that Nvidia was planning to further scale back the H20’s performance to meet U.S. requirements.
Still, the H20 chip is wildly popular in China, and is used by several major AI firms– such as Bytedance, DeepSeek, Tencent, and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU).