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NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said on Tuesday that he does not expect China’s government to make a formal announcement allowing Chinese firms to import the company’s H200 artificial intelligence chips, adding that evidence of approval would be seen through purchase orders.

“I expect that we're not expecting any press releases or any large declarations,” Huang said, while noting that demand for the H200 chips among Chinese customers remains strong.

Last year, US President Donald Trump reversed a longstanding ban on shipping advanced AI chips to China, allowing NVIDIA to sell the H200 chips, which are the predecessor to the company’s flagship Blackwell processors.

Earlier on Tuesday, NVIDIA Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said in an interview with a JPMorgan analyst that the US government is “working feverishly” on license applications required for shipping H200 chips to China. However, she said the company does not yet know when approvals will be granted.

Meanwhile, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI announced the completion of a $20 billion funding round. The investors include NVIDIA, Valor Equity Partners and the Qatar Investment Authority, along with Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research, MGX, Baron Capital Group and Cisco Systems Inc.’s investment group.

The company did not disclose individual investment amounts or the mix between debt and equity. Reports said xAI had planned around $7.5 billion of equity and up to $12.5 billion of debt, partly to acquire NVIDIA processors that would be rented out over five years.

xAI said the funding will accelerate infrastructure buildout, speed up development and deployment of AI products to billions of users, and support research aimed at “understanding the universe.”

The startup has already raised about $10 billion in equity and debt in 2025 and has been burning around $1 billion per month, according to reports. Musk has said xAI is expanding data centre capacity in Memphis toward nearly 2 gigawatts.

On Monday, NVIDIA showcased six new chips that are now in full production as part of its next-generation Vera Rubin AI computing systems. Kress declined to comment on any specific production bottlenecks but said the company feels “very solid” about its supply chain.

NVIDIA has called for $500 billion in sales from its Blackwell and upcoming Rubin platforms by the end of the year. Kress said discussions with customers on data centre buildouts for 2027 have already begun.

At CES 2026 in Las Vegas, Huang said artificial intelligence is moving beyond data centres into the physical world, with autonomous vehicles emerging as a key application. He announced that the first passenger car featuring NVIDIA’s Alpamayo autonomous driving technology will soon be on the roads in the all-new Mercedes-Benz CLA.

“Our vision is that someday, every single car, every single truck will be autonomous,” Huang said.

He said AI-defined driving for the Mercedes-Benz CLA will arrive in the United States this year. Alpamayo is designed to enable Level-4-capable autonomous driving and can reason about driving actions, not just execute commands.

Huang said the CLA will be built on NVIDIA’s DRIVE full-stack autonomous vehicle platform. He added that accelerated computing and AI are reshaping technology systems worldwide.

“Computing has been fundamentally reshaped as a result of accelerated computing,” Huang said.

Anubhav Maurya is a business journalist and Senior Sub Editor at Zee Business, where he covers the stock market, economy, industry trends, mutual funds, and personal financ