By Sama Marwan,
The American tech giant NVIDIA plans to open a research and development center in Shanghai, in a new move aimed at strengthening its presence in the Chinese market, following the restrictions imposed by the administration of former U.S. President Donald Trump on the export of AI chips.
According to informed sources, the company’s CEO Jensen Huang visited China last April, where he met with the Mayor of Shanghai and discussed the plan to establish the new center. The Chinese official welcomed the initiative and expressed the city’s readiness to provide the necessary support, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The new center aims to enhance the teams responsible for studying the needs of Chinese customers and relaying them to the company’s headquarters. This would help NVIDIA design products that are aligned with the Chinese market while also complying with U.S. regulations, according to sources who preferred to remain anonymous.
Since 2022, Washington has required licenses for exporting NVIDIA’s advanced chips to China, which negatively affected the company’s sales. Revenues from the Chinese market dropped to 13% of total revenue in the past fiscal year, compared to 26% before the restrictions.
NVIDIA is currently looking to lease office space in Shanghai for its new center, to accommodate its existing employees in China as well as potential new hires. Sources stated that officials in Shanghai—which also hosts the facility of American company Tesla, owned by Elon Musk (a known Trump ally)—have offered tax incentives and procedural support to back the project.
In an official statement, NVIDIA confirmed that it does not send any GPU (graphics processing unit) designs to China for modification in order to comply with U.S. export regulations.
Previously, NVIDIA released lower-performance versions of its chips after stricter U.S. rules were implemented, in an effort to continue selling its products in China—a move that sparked criticism among some American officials who argued it undermines efforts to limit the development of Chinese AI capabilities.
NVIDIA has emphasized its full compliance with U.S. laws, while also stressing the importance of meeting the needs of Chinese clients instead of leaving the market to local competitors like Huawei, which has started to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of American firms. The company reiterated that none of its chip designs are reengineered within China.
NVIDIA currently employs around 4,000 people in China, nearly half of whom are based in Shanghai, where some engineers also participate in global development projects and research in advanced fields such as autonomous driving.
