It's existential for Nvidia. Jensen understood that the longer he can freely sell to China, the less opportunity/incentive there is for Chinese companies to produce their own silicon and compete head-to-head with Nvidia.

This is exactly how it played out, too, which is why Huawei chips have started taking inference workloads in China and we're now starting to see them in training too.

It's kinda bad business to fully pull out of a giant market, with a massive customer base, because of a major boom cycle in your product.

Do you know how difficult it is for a company to expand their business to new markets? Do you know difficult it is the build up a customer base in a market?

This isn't just doing addition and subtraction on n GPUs/year. This is business. We wouldn't have so many businessmen if business was that simple.