Shares of Nvidia rising today, as the chipmaker says, it expects to be able to sell in China again.

But can it pull ahead of rivals in that country?

Our dear Dubosa is watching that in today's tech check. Morning, Dee.

Hey, good morning, Carl. So, Wall Street, it's busy calculating the revenue rebound.

But here is the bigger picture. This isn't just about selling chips again.

It's about keeping China inside Nvidia's software ecosystem. Now the H20 chip, it is actually slower than many

of the alternatives on the market, including Huawei's Ascend, but China's AI

developers, they're still building on Nvidia's Kuda. That is the software layer that

tells the chips what to do and how to train the AI models.

So it's like an operating system for AI development that everyone from Alibaba to Deep Seek build on.

And that is the real lock-in.

Had Washington fully blocked Nvidia from selling even downgraded chips like the H20,

it would not have stopped Chinese AI.

It would have just accelerated Huawei's push to build a homegrown

alternative, something David Sachs was talking about earlier on in the hour. Now, Huawei is already

reportedly redesigning its next AI chip to make it easier for developers to switch off Kuda.

The goal is to win over Chinese companies that still rely on NvidiaVIDIA's software, even when they can't easily

buy the software. So a full ban could have handed Huawei the opening that it needed, a captive

market with no choice but to build around its own chips and its own ecosystem. Necessity is the

mother of invention, that phrase that our audience has heard often this year when it comes to the

race between the U.S.

and China and AI.

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