By Adam Clark

Nvidia needs a boost as it headed for its lowest levels of 2026 so far early Monday. The resumption of sales in China looks promising but competition from a new Huawei chip could be an obstacle.

Nvidia shares were down 1.2% at $170.68 in premarket trading. If the move holds to the end of trading then it will set its lowest closing level for the year so far, which was around $172 in early February.

One of the factors Nvidia is counting on to get the shares going is prospective sales in China. However, Huawei has just launched its Atlas 350 accelerator, designed for artificial-intelligence inference --producing output from AI models-- according to multiple reports from domestic Chinese media.

Notably, Huawei claims the Atlas 350 can deliver nearly three times the computing power of Nvidia's H20 chip, one version of the limited hardware the U.S. chip maker is permitted to sell to China by the American government.

It is difficult to directly compare AI chips, which can produce very different benchmarking results under different configurations. One particular issue of previous Huawei systems has been that they consume significantly more power than Nvidia's AI servers. However, a domestic alternative could still hamper Nvidia's ambitions in China.

After multiple twists and turns in both Beijing and Washington, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last week that the company had restarted manufacturing of its H200 processors for sale in China and that it had received orders from many customers. However, he didn't specify how much revenue the company expected to generate.

The H200 is more advanced than the H20, but is not as powerful as Nvidia's current generation Blackwell AI chips.

Huang previously said China represents a $50 billion market for AI infrastructure, growing at 50% a year. If authorities permit widespread sales then Chinese companies would be willing to buy around 1.5 million of the H200 chips this year, representing roughly $30 billion in revenue, according to KeyBanc analyst John Vinh.

Write to Adam Clark at adam.clark@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 23, 2026 07:17 ET (11:17 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.