(BFM Stock Exchange) – The American flea giant is down sharply at the opening this Wednesday, April 16, while the Trump administration restricts the export of fleas to China. This decision will weigh on the accounts of the first quarter of Nvidia, the group having warned that he was going to record an exceptional burden of $ 5.5 billion.

Nvidia is in spite of himself taken in the trade war that is played out between China and the United States. The American chip giant warned that the export restrictions of semiconductors to China were going to weigh strongly in its first quarter results of its 2026 fiscal year, the corresponding period between February and the end of April 2025.

Nvidia will have to go into its accounts “up to around 5.5 billion dollars (4.83 billion euros) of charges associated with H20 products (due to costs) of stocks, purchase commitments and linked reserves”, in a document transmitted on Tuesday, April 15, to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the American stock market gendarme.

“The $ 5.5 billion in depreciations will concern stocks and purchasing commitments for the H20, because we assume that these less efficient chips may not find takers of developed markets”, explains Morningstar on Wednesday.

In this same document, the Californian group recalls having been informed on April 9, by Washington that he had to obtain a specific license to export his H20 chips to China and other countries. The US government said on Monday, April 14, that these rules would remain in force indefinitely.

“The US government said that the license obligation responded to the risk that the products covered to be used in a supermarket in China or diverted to it. On April 14, 2025, the US government informed the company that the license obligation would be in force for an indefinite period,” said Nvidia in this document transmitted to the SEC.

The H20 chip was designed specifically for the Chinese market to allow Nvidia to bypass previous American restrictions, as Morningstar recalls. .

These new restrictions weigh on the NVIDIA course, which fell 6% this Wednesday at the start of the session at Wall Street. AMD is falling 6.5% too, the American group also being affected by this screw tour.

Keep the technological advantage

To maintain its technological advantage and avoid being caught up by China, the United States has indeed introduced a series of constraints on the semiconductors offered by large American groups, including NVIDIA.

This new decision is “motivated by the concerns aroused by the rise of China in the electronics sector” and, in this sense, it is likely to become a permanent policy, “said Tomo Kinoshita, a strategist of the world market at Investco Asset Management.

And these concerns mounted a notch in February, when Deepseek and his model of artificial intelligence (AI) at a lower cost have turned a whole ecosystem archi-Dominated by American groups.

Especially since Deepseek had claimed to have built his AI model with 2,048 GPU H800 from Nvidia, chips much less advanced than other products in the group, such as H100 chips.

The American authorities do everything in their power to maintain this precious advantage in the AI ​​race. Even if it means very strongly encouraging American groups to produce their fleas at home.

On Monday, April 14, NVIDIA announced a colossal investment of $ 500 billion over the next four years to produce AI supercomputers entirely in the United States.

“It is unlikely that Nvidia would have moved production in the United States without pressure from the Trump administration,” said Gil Luria, analyst at Da Davidson, quoted by Reuters.

For his part, Morningstar is waiting to obtain more information on these restrictions, as well as on customs prices and the general state of expenditure on AI, during the conference call on the results of Nvidia which will take place at the end of May.

For the first quarter, NVIDIA announced count on income of $ 43 billion, and a gross margin rate between 70.6% and 71%.

This decline in profitability is explained by the rise of the new architecture of graphic processors called “Blackwell”, more powerful and more energy efficient. If it copiously fuels the growth of the company, this industrial transition weighs for the time on the profitability of the company.

Colette Kress, the financial director, said at the end of February that the industrial power of Blackwell would be “significant” in the first quarter. “We doubt that companies slow down their investments in AI, which could support the sales of GPU of AI until 2025,” also explains Morningstar.