Shares of NVIDIA up about 5% since announcing that it does expect to be able to resume selling those H20 chips in China, a move that could add some fresh fuel for China's AI ambitions.

For that, we'll turn to Deirdre Bosa today in today's tech check. Happy Friday, Dee.

Hey, happy Friday. Good morning, Carl. So the plus side for the U.S. of this development is that the momentum will still run on American

Rails.

With the age 20's return, NVIDIA, it remains the background of Chinese AI, not just through

hardware, but through Kuda Software 2, which we talked about it, locks developers into

Nvidia's ecosystem.

The downside though is that Chinese labs, they're getting very good at doing more with less.

Deep Seeks original R1 and now the latest breakout challenger, Kimi K2, they have proved

that models can be scaled and optimized on far less performant hardware.

Now despite the export ban, they've already been gaining ground Chinese models.

Take a look at the model rankings on Ellam Arena.a.i, two, an open source model from Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot, it's in fifth

place overall, jumping ahead of Deepseek. The next non-Chinese open source model on the leaderboard,

that's Mistral's. While Meta's Lama, which was once the gold standard in open

source, it has fallen way down to spot number 34. Now, the hardware story may be shifting again.

Invidia is preparing the B30. This is another export compliant chip just for China, with shipments

expected as early as this quarter. AMD is sampling a China legal version of its MI300X.

The net effect, guys, is that instead of starving China's AI push,

the U.S. policy is creating a parallel hardware channel just trimmed for compliance.

And really, that's exactly what policy makers like AI star David Sacks intended to do.

But this also opens up a new extremely competitive leg of the AI race where it's not

about slowing anyone down, but about who can innovate and who can execute better.

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