nvidia
Nvidia faces a chip-design arms race while China opens the door to H200 sales, but competitors are raising billions to threaten its dominance.
China is allowing its leading AI companies to purchase a limited quantity of Nvidia's H200 chips, according to The Information. Think of this as a government loosening restrictions on importing premium technology—Nvidia had been blocked from selling its most advanced chips to China due to U.S. export controls. This is a modest but symbolically important win for Nvidia in a market that accounts for a huge slice of potential revenue.
Nvidia is now partnering with competitors in the AI chip space, including startup d-Matrix, as it adapts to a shifting market, The Information reported. Rather than crushing rivals, Nvidia is recognizing that the AI boom is big enough for multiple chip designs—it's like a restaurant giant licensing its recipes to food trucks instead of fighting them. This signals Nvidia sees partnership as smarter than pure competition in a rapidly fragmenting market.
SambaNova, an AI chip startup, just raised $1 billion in new funding at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic, with major investors like T. Rowe Price and Capital Group joining in (CNBC Tech, TechCrunch). The company makes inference chips—basically the semiconductors that run trained AI models cheaply and quickly, as opposed to the training chips Nvidia dominates. SambaNova is now plotting an IPO in 2027 and has already landed blue-chip customers including JPMorgan Chase, which chose it to power private, on-premises AI infrastructure.