Nvidia is pushing its silicon into places its data-center rivals have yet to reach — including low Earth orbit. According to Reuters, space venture TakeMe2Space is preparing to launch an orbital-computing satellite carrying Nvidia’s Orin NX processors. The MOI-1A mission is slated to lift off on October 1 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-18 flight.
The move underscores the chipmaker’s drive to carve out specialized niches well beyond terrestrial server farms. Processing data directly in orbit would allow information to be analyzed in space, easing pressure on constrained transmission bandwidth.
Investors barely blinked at the news. In pre-market trading on Monday, the stock stood at EUR 196.80, a modest 0.5% decline that left it 2.8% below its 52-week high.
A Doubling Target — and a Manufacturing Bottleneck
The core business is where the real scale ambitions lie. Chief executive Jensen Huang said on September 17 that he expects the number of chips sold in 2027 to double from 2026 levels, pointing to sustained demand for artificial-intelligence applications as the main driver. Two days earlier, Huang argued the industry needs no fresh regulation, contending that market forces can deliver safe innovation on their own.
Not everyone shares the enthusiasm. Analyst Jay Goldberg of Seaport struck a cautious tone on Thursday, seeing only limited upside for the shares and citing manufacturing constraints at contract chipmaker TSMC alongside a tougher competitive landscape.
Hedging activity has picked up in tandem. On Wednesday, Nicholas Godec, an executive at S&P Dow Jones Indices, pointed to data from clearinghouse DTCC showing that the notional volume of credit protection on Nvidia debt reached $6.9 billion over a six-month span.
Washington’s Red Tape, Beijing’s Appetite
Geopolitical lines can be drawn with the stroke of a pen; economic realities cannot. Since Washington’s export controls sharply curtailed sales of advanced accelerators to the Far East, China had been effectively written off for Nvidia’s biggest hardware deals. For the current third quarter, the company’s guidance of $108 billion in revenue prudently assumed zero proceeds from Chinese data centers.
Yet technological gravity has a way of reasserting itself. According to US trade outlet The Information, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is weighing whether domestic tech giants such as Alibaba and ByteDance may procure new workstation chips of the RTX Pro 5500 type. The ministry reportedly asked for specific unit volumes and intended use cases, while ByteDance is already mulling a preliminary requirement of roughly one million units. No approval has been granted and no confirmation is available — but the signal carries weight.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying Nvidia?
The interest in the RTX Pro 5500 is no accident. Built on the modern Blackwell architecture with 84 gigabytes of GDDR7 memory, the chip is formally aimed at professional workstations. Industry observers speculate that such workstation cards may not fall under the same rigid US export bans as full-fledged high-performance server chips. To date, heavily throttled H200 sales have accounted for less than 1% of Nvidia’s data-center revenue, according to Susan Li. Officially sanctioned access to workstation accelerators could therefore offer Chinese AI firms meaningful relief.
A parallel report surfaced Monday suggesting China had signaled that ByteDance and Alibaba would be permitted to buy RTX PRO 5500 workstation chips. Reuters cautioned, however, that it could not independently verify those claims.
Building Out the Entire Stack
Can a technology company outgrow the geopolitical conflicts of its era? A glance at Nvidia’s global order book suggests the answer lies in the sheer scale of the Western investment wave.
Elon Musk recently laid out the dimensions: the Colossus 2 supercluster already comprises 110,000 GB200 units plus 440,000 GB300 units, with further massive expansion planned in the months ahead. Meanwhile, Huang is in New York on Monday meeting with the leadership of Samsung and the SK Group to advance future memory and infrastructure alliances.
Nvidia is also broadening its profile. Chief financial officer Colette Kress has dangled $20 billion in revenue from the pure CPU segment for the current year. The company is not resting on its role as GPU monopolist — it is systematically occupying the entire data-center value chain.
Markets Shrug Off the Noise
The shares closed Friday at EUR 197.76, up 23% since the start of the year and just 2.3% shy of their 52-week high. Those numbers reflect what the latest signals from Beijing underscore once more: global demand for computing power is no short-term hype but a fundamental upgrade of modern economies.
Should China greenlight purchases of the workstation chips and Washington not stand in the way, Nvidia would unlock additional demand that its current outlook simply penciled in at zero. Even if the approval stumbles over bureaucratic hurdles, one fundamental truth endures: the world is hungry for compute — and for now, the key to it still lies in Silicon Valley.
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