Nearly three months after the Trump administration allowed Nvidia to sell its H200 accelerator in China, the GPU giant is still waiting for Beijing to allow them in and for any revenue to materialize.

CFO Colette Kress isn’t counting on the situation to improve any time soon either. The company’s Q1 2027 revenue forecast doesn’t account for a single cent of Chinese datacenter revenues.

In early December, the Trump administration reversed an export ban restricting the sale of Nvidia’s H200 accelerators to Chinese customers, in exchange for a 25 percent cut of the revenue from sales. The 2023-vintage chip remains one of the GPU giant’s most potent AI accelerators.

“While small amounts of H200 products for China based customers were approved by the US government, we have yet to generate any revenue, and we do not know whether any imports will be allowed into China,” Kress said.

That’s a reference to the fact that while Washington is happy for H200 sales, Beijing has not granted its blessing.

Speaking with analysts, Kress emphasized the dangers of a technological decoupling.

“Our competitors in China, bolstered by recent IPOs, are making progress and have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry over the long term,” she said. “To sustain its leadership position in AI… America must engage every developer and be the platform of choice for every commercial business, including those in China.”

Kress’ comments broadly align with concerns raised by rival AMD, and partners, Microsoft, Coreweave, and OpenAI last northern spring.

Taking Nvidia’s revenues orbital

China isn’t the only place Nvidia lacks visibility. Asked about the viability of orbital datacenters, CEO Jensen Huang opined about the economics, challenges and opportunities of deploying GPUs in space.

According to Huang, artificial intelligence in space will have very interesting applications, but it also faces challenges different from what we’re used to here on Earth.

“The way that space works is radically different than how it works down here. There’s an abundance of energy, but solar panels are large, but there’s plenty of space in space,” he said. “The energy, the heat dissipation, it’s cold in space. However, there’s no air flow, and so the only way to dissipate that heat is through conduction, and the radiators that you need to create are fairly large. Liquid cooling is obviously out of the question, because it’s kind of heavy and freezes.”

Having said that, Huang argues that there are AI applications that do make sense to compute in space.

“There are many different computing problems that really want to be done in space,” he said. “One of the best use cases of GPUs in space is imaging. To be able to do imaging at very large, very high resolutions, extremely large scales and very, very fast, it’s hard to do that by sending petabytes and petabytes of imaging data back here on Earth and doing that work, it’s easier just to do it out in space.”

For the moment, Huang said the economics of space-based datacenters are poor, but argued this will improve over time.

He’s not alone in those views.

“Companies are wasting money by pouring funds into the orbital datacenter ‘bubble’ because the economics do not work,” Gartner analyst Bill Ray wrote in a report this week, describing the entire idea as “peak insanity.”

Yet Google is also exploring the potential for space-based TPU clusters, while Amazon founder Jeff Bezos predicts that within the next two decades gigawatt-scale datacenters would fill the skies powered by an enduring stream of photons.

Elon Musk, however, is all-in on the idea of orbiting datacenters and plans to make it happen soon.

The numbers

Even without orbital datacenters or Chinese H200 sales, Nvidia expects to continue its rally as it heads into the 2027 fiscal year.

The company expects to rake in $78 billion give or take two percent during the first quarter as it capitalizes on growing demand from hyperscale customers, like Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft which expect to plow a collective $635 billion into datacenters and AI infrastructure this year alone.

The rosy outlook, which would amount to almost 90 percent year-over-year revenue growth, follows a particularly strong quarter for the GPU slinger. In Q4, Nvidia’s profits topped $42.96 billion on revenues of $68.12 billion.

Nvidia’s datacenter business accounted for more than 90 percent of revenues at $62.3 billion. By comparison, the company’s gaming, professional visualization, and automotive businesses could soon be rounding errors at $3.7 billion, $1.3 billion, and $604 million, respectively, if trends continue.

For the full 2026 fiscal year, Nvidia turned a $120 billion profit on revenues of $215.93 billion. ®