“This isn’t just about profit margins,” said a former U.S. trade official. “It’s about technological sovereignty. And right now, NVIDIA is the crown jewel.”
That crown has never looked shinier—or more fragile.
NVIDIA’s New Normal: Record Profits, Rising Stakes
In May 2025, NVIDIA reported its Q1 FY2025 earnings, once again smashing Wall Street expectations. The company posted $26 billion in quarterly revenue, with over 75% coming from its data center division, driven by insatiable demand for its H100 and new B100 GPUs source: NVIDIA Investor Relations.
The company’s Blackwell architecture, launched earlier this year, introduced its next-generation B100 and upcoming B200 chips. These are optimized for large-scale AI workloads and promise higher performance-per-watt than the previous Hopper series source: NVIDIA GTC 2025 Keynote.
Despite market volatility and occasional corrections, NVIDIA stock remains near all-time highs, buoyed by investor confidence and a broader AI gold rush source: Bloomberg Markets.
Export Bans and the Battle for Chip Supremacy
But profit hasn’t made NVIDIA immune to global turbulence.
In late 2024 and early 2025, the U.S. Department of Commerce tightened export restrictions on high-performance AI chips to China. This includes bans on NVIDIA’s H100 and A100 chips, citing concerns over their potential military applications source: U.S. Commerce Department.
In response, NVIDIA created the H20, a lower-performance chip designed to comply with new regulations. Yet Chinese regulators are reportedly stalling its rollout, viewing the move as a workaround source: Reuters.
Meanwhile, China has doubled down on domestic alternatives. Huawei’s Ascend 910B and SMIC’s efforts at sub-7nm fabrication mark real progress, although they still lag behind NVIDIA’s latest chips source: South China Morning Post.
As one analyst told CNBC, “NVIDIA is caught between national interests—wanted by both sides, trusted by neither.”
Project Stargate and the Quest for AGI
One of the most ambitious undertakings in tech right now is Project Stargate, a multi-billion-dollar AI supercomputing initiative by OpenAI and Microsoft. While details remain under wraps, reporting from The Information and Bloomberg suggests that NVIDIA is the silent engine behind it.
The project is rumored to rely on hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA B100 and B200 GPUs, pushing the boundaries of what’s computationally possible in pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) source: The Information.
This alignment places NVIDIA at the heart of a potentially transformative leap in AI. But it also raises uncomfortable questions: who controls the compute, and who gets to decide how it’s used?
AI Hegemony and CUDA Lock-In
NVIDIA’s dominance doesn’t just come from hardware.
Its CUDA software platform, the framework that allows developers to program GPUs for AI tasks, is a critical part of the company’s moat. Most AI tools, from PyTorch to TensorFlow, are optimized for CUDA. That makes switching vendors costly and time-consuming for both startups and hyperscalers source: MIT Technology Review.
While challengers like AMD (with ROCm), Intel (Gaudi), and Cerebras (wafer-scale engines) have made technological strides, none have yet cracked the twin challenges of performance and developer adoption.
CUDA, not just silicon, is NVIDIA’s secret weapon.
Taiwan, TSMC, and the Fragile Supply Chain
For all its innovation, NVIDIA doesn’t manufacture its own chips.
That task falls to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which fabricates nearly all of NVIDIA’s advanced GPUs. This places NVIDIA’s production squarely within the geopolitical flashpoint of Taiwan, a region viewed by Beijing as a breakaway province, and by Washington as a strategic ally source: Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Military escalation in the Taiwan Strait, or even a naval blockade, could cripple NVIDIA’s ability to deliver chips globally.
In a recent research note, JPMorgan analysts labeled NVIDIA’s Taiwan dependency “a strategic exposure that cannot be hedged with inventory alone” [source: JPMorgan Equity Research].
Market Outlook: Hype vs. Hard Reality
Despite these risks, analysts remain bullish. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley both reaffirmed NVIDIA as a top pick, citing its unmatched lead in performance, software, and ecosystem dominance source: CNBC.
The AI semiconductor market is projected to exceed $150 billion by 2027, with NVIDIA capturing the lion’s share—assuming no catastrophic geopolitical disruption source: IDC AI Chip Market Forecast.
Yet the path forward is far from smooth.
Questions loom over whether centralized GPU-based models will remain dominant, or whether the future lies in on-device AI and low-power accelerators. Apple and Google are betting on edge computing. If their vision wins, NVIDIA could find itself building yesterday’s infrastructure for tomorrow’s world.
Shaping the Future, or Being Shaped by It?
NVIDIA stands as the most important tech company that most people can’t explain.
Its chips run the software that shapes our media, our economies, and increasingly, our geopolitics. It is the beating heart of AI, but also a pressure point in a fractured world.
It could become the Intel of the AI age—dominant, indispensable, and heavily regulated. Or it could become overexposed, cornered by national security interests and outflanked by architectural innovation.
In the race to artificial intelligence, there is no neutral ground. And NVIDIA, willingly or not, is no longer just a company.
It’s a battlefield.
Sources
- NVIDIA Q1 FY2025 Earnings
- NVIDIA GTC 2025 Keynote
- U.S. Commerce Department Export Controls
- Reuters – H20 Export Compliance
- South China Morning Post – Huawei AI Chips
- The Information – Project Stargate
- MIT Technology Review – CUDA Ecosystem
- Center for Strategic & International Studies – Taiwan & Chip Supply
- IDC – AI Chip Market Forecast 2027
- CNBC – Analyst Coverage on NVIDIA
