Nvidia’s China H200 Green Light and French Antitrust Probe Create a Split-Screen Week

Beijing conditionally allows Nvidia H200 purchases by Alibaba, ByteDance; French regulators prepare formal complaint, but stock gains 7.34% weekly.

Peking has cracked open the door to Nvidia’s high-end chips for the first time in months, but a looming French cartel complaint threatens to pull focus in the opposite direction. The result is a week where Nvidia’s share price is being pulled by two very different forces — and so far, the bulls are winning.

On Friday, the stock closed at €184.60, up 4.04% on the day, bringing the weekly gain to 7.34% and the year-to-date advance to 14.59%. The catalyst for the rally came late in the week: market reports on July 10 indicated that Beijing has given conditional approval for large domestic tech groups — including Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek — to purchase Nvidia’s H200 processors. The total volume is capped at under 200,000 units, and each company must justify its specific need and requested quantity. Investors are reading the quota as a tentative first step toward normalising trade in high-end semiconductors, even if the restrictions remain tight.

That cautious optimism will be tested almost immediately by France’s competition authority, which is reportedly preparing a formal antitrust complaint against Nvidia in the coming weeks. If filed, it would mark the first official enforcement action against the chipmaker by any regulator worldwide. The probe, which began with surprise raids at Nvidia’s French offices in September 2023, focuses on two practices: the CUDA software platform, which regulators suspect locks developers into Nvidia’s hardware ecosystem, and the company’s equity stakes in AI-cloud providers such as CoreWeave. Under French law, penalties for abuse of market dominance can reach 10% of global annual revenue. With Nvidia posting $215.9 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026 — up 65% year-on-year — a maximum fine would be substantial, though the actual amount remains unknown.

While antitrust clouds gather in Europe, Nvidia’s commercial expansion continues unabated. The company is leading a $500 million investment in Australian cloud startup Firmus Technologies as part of a $2 billion funding round aimed at building sovereign cloud providers that run on Nvidia hardware. Separately, AI search platform Perplexity announced on July 7 that it will use Nvidia’s new Vera CPUs for its multi-agent coding infrastructure, citing a 1.5x speed advantage over traditional x86 server processors in such environments. These deals underscore Nvidia’s shift from selling individual chips to delivering integrated “AI Factory” packages combining GPUs, CPUs and networking gear — a strategy that pushed data-centre revenue to $75.25 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, up 92% year-on-year.

Additional tailwinds came from South Korea, where memory-chip maker SK Hynix — a key supplier of High Bandwidth Memory for Nvidia’s GPU architectures — made a successful U.S. stock market debut. The positive reception strengthened confidence in Nvidia’s supply chain, particularly as the ramp-up of the Blackwell platform continues. Meanwhile, the first shipments of the Rubin architecture are scheduled to go out this month to major AI customers, though Nvidia’s near-term volume will remain dominated by Blackwell, which accounts for over 70% of high-end GPU deliveries through the end of 2026.

Not everything is running smoothly on the hardware front. The Kyber NVL144 rack architecture, originally designed for ultra-high-performance chips, has been delayed until 2028 due to manufacturing issues with the PCB interposer board. Unconfirmed market rumours also point to potential delays for the successor to Rubin, although the current Rubin generation is already in full production and on track for autumn delivery.

Analysts remain firmly behind the story. Morgan Stanley reaffirmed its “Overweight” rating and named Nvidia the “Top Pick” in semiconductors, raising its price target to $288. TD Cowen reiterated its “Buy” rating with a $275 target after meetings with CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress. Management reportedly stressed that demand for AI compute is constrained by availability, not appetite, and that cloud-contract pricing remains stable at high levels.

Technically, the stock is showing solid recovery momentum but still has ground to cover. It now sits 1.87% above its 50-day moving average of €181.22 and 12% above its 200-day average of €164.78. The relative strength index of 58.6 is in the upper neutral zone, suggesting neither overbought nor oversold conditions. The 52-week high of €202.50 from May remains 8.84% away, while the annual low of €140.30 is 31.58% in the rearview mirror. With an annualised volatility of 36.42%, the market is pricing in significant swings — especially if the French regulator formally files its complaint.

The week ahead brings several events that could set the tone. On Monday July 13, So-young Jung, head of Nvidia Korea, will deliver a keynote at the Busan R&D Conference on the “Next Wave of New Industrial Revolution by AI Factory.” The Strategic Materials Conference in San Jose from July 13–15 will cover advanced packaging and HBM4 certification — supply-chain topics that will shape the industry through 2027. For now, Nvidia’s China opening remains a narrow, conditional concession; whether it evolves into a lasting easing will depend on how the case-by-case approvals play out in the coming weeks.