NVIDIA SLIPS BACK INTO CHINA THROUGH THE BACK DOOR — VERA CPU ORDERS OPEN NOW, SHIPMENTS IN AUGUST US export controls wiped out Nvidia’s China business. Jensen Huang said in October that the company’s market share there had fallen to roughly zero. H200 GPU shipments have been frozen for months. The world’s most valuable company was effectively locked out of the world’s largest AI market. Then Nvidia noticed something. Washington’s export controls focus on advanced GPUs. They do not specifically target CPUs. Reuters reported on June 12 that Nvidia has begun pitching its Vera processor to Chinese cloud providers. Orders are open now. Deliveries could begin in August 2026. One major Chinese cloud company is already planning to order more than 300 servers, each holding two Vera CPUs, to test before committing to larger purchases. Vera is Nvidia’s first standalone CPU built specifically for agentic AI workloads. It is an Arm-based 88-core chip that handles the data movement, memory management, and orchestration tasks that GPUs are not designed for. A single chip costs well above $20,000. A full 256-chip rack runs approximately $10 million. This is a strategic play dressed as a product launch. Nvidia is not technically circumventing export controls because CPUs fall outside the restricted categories. Whether Washington sees it that way is a different question entirely. The move tests the boundary between what the rules actually say and what they were designed to prevent. Alibaba and ByteDance were already confirmed as launch partners for Vera when it was unveiled in March. Whether their China-based operations are included in these deals has not been specified. Keywords: Nvidia Vera CPU China, Nvidia export controls workaround, AI chip China 2026, Jensen Huang China market