NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) H20 chip regains export license to China, Needham raises target price to $200.

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US) recently announced plans to resume selling its H20 chips in the Chinese market and stated that it has obtained assurances of an export license from the US government. In response to this news, prominent investment firm Needham raised NVIDIA Corporation's stock price target from $160 to $200 and maintained a "buy" rating. Analysts led by N. Quinn Bolton pointed out that in April of this year, export controls led to a ban on H20 product shipments, resulting in NVIDIA Corporation being unable to complete $2.5 billion in chip shipments for the first quarter of the 2026 fiscal year, and also causing the suspension of nearly $8 billion worth of H20 orders scheduled for delivery in the second quarter. Although NVIDIA Corporation has not disclosed specific revenue expectations for H20 chips in future quarters, analysts have made conservative estimates based on expectations of market recovery: starting from the third quarter of the 2026 fiscal year (October), shipments of the chip are expected to reach a scale of $3 billion per quarter. It is worth noting that NVIDIA Corporation is developing variants of the Blackwell architecture GPU products (including models such as B30/B40/RTX 6000D) for the Chinese market, with the products expected to start shipping between August and September. This policy adjustment and new product layout are seen as important strategic adjustments for NVIDIA Corporation to meet the demands of the Chinese market. H20 is an AI accelerator designed by NVIDIA Corporation specifically for the Chinese market, based on the Hopper architecture, with 96GB of HBM3 memory and a memory bandwidth of 4.0TB/s. Its FP8 performance is 296 TFLOPS, and FP16 performance is 148 TFLOPS. Compared to the H100, the number of GPU cores has been reduced by 41%, and performance has decreased by 28%. H20 is more suitable for vertical model training and inference. However, the upgrade of US semiconductor export control policies posed challenges for NVIDIA Corporation's sales in the Chinese market. The US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) issued two important new export control regulations for the Chinese semiconductor industry, further strengthening restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductor technology and various terminal application products. The new regulations amended the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) to add the FDP and FN5 FDP rules for semiconductor manufacturing equipment, restricting China's access to advanced semiconductor technology and products. In this context, the export of NVIDIA Corporation's H20 chips was once blocked, resulting in many orders being unable to be completed. However, with NVIDIA Corporation obtaining an export license from the US government, the H20 chips have been able to return to the Chinese market. This is undoubtedly good news for NVIDIA Corporation, helping to alleviate sales pressure in the Chinese market. As of writing, NVIDIA Corporation's stock is slightly up in pre-market trading, at $171. Additionally, NVIDIA Corporation is actively developing new products to meet the demands of the Chinese market, and the launch of the Blackwell architecture GPU variants will further enrich NVIDIA Corporation's product line in the Chinese market.