Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) will definitely benefit from being allowed to sell artificial intelligence chips to China, but to what extent is still a big unknown, BNP Paribas said.
“While a positive over the medium term, it’s unclear 1) how much H200 supply is available to ship in CY26, 2) how much demand there is from China and 3) the Chinese government’s view on this,” BNP Paribas Research senior analyst David O’Connor wrote in a note to clients. And given that China could limit access to Nvidia’s H200 chips, it may be a “tricky road ahead for China H200 importers,” O’Connor added.
O’Connor, who has a $260 price target on Nvidia, said supply of AI chips will still be “very tight” in 2026. As such, it’s not clear how much supply of H200 GPUs there will be, especially when factoring in the limited amounts of high-bandwidth memory, chip-on-a-wafer-substrate packaging, and front-end wafers, he added.
There is also the question of demand from China, which could be a wild card, O’Connor conceded. The country has been trying to push alternatives to Nvidia, notably Huawei. However, the performance of Huawei’s offerings are well behind Nvidia’s Blackwell line of GPUs and, to some extent, Nvidia’s H200 offerings, which only get around 40% of the performance as Blackwell.
“Thus, we think H200 demand in China should be strong as it’s very important for China to be a leader in AI, where access to AI chips has been a limiting factor for China,” O’Connor added.