Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL, XETRA:APC) and Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA, XETRA:NVD) both posted China wins this week. The trade war that was supposed to shut American companies out has, for now, given the strongest ones a competitive edge.
Two pieces of news arrived within 48 hours that tell a more interesting story together than either does alone. Apple posted a 23% jump in China smartphone sales in the first nine weeks of 2026, against a market that shrank 4% overall. Before that, on Tuesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stood up at his company's GTC conference in San Jose and said something that would have seemed unlikely a year ago: "We have received purchase orders, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. That's new news for all of you."
Both companies are winning in China. Both are doing it in different ways. And both are doing it inside a trade environment that has been in near-constant upheaval since Trump returned to the White House.
How Trump scrambled the board
Through 2025, Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods reached triple digits before a series of truces and reversals brought rates back down.
In February this year, the Supreme Court struck down some of the most sweeping measures, ruling that Trump had exceeded his legal authority by using emergency economic powers to impose broad tariffs across almost all US trade partners. Trump scrambled to reimpose duties under different statutes.
Last week, his administration launched fresh trade investigations into China and more than a dozen other economies, which could lead to yet another round of levies. High-level talks in Paris on Monday saw China warn that these moves could damage trade ties, even as both sides agreed to push for stability ahead of a planned Trump-Xi summit later this month.
The result is a relationship that is neither war nor peace. For US companies, that ambiguity has become the operating condition.
Nvidia's long road back
Nvidia was effectively shut out of China from April 2025, when export controls required it to obtain a licence before shipping chips there. China had previously accounted for at least one-fifth of its data centre revenue.
The path back has been torturous. Trump negotiated a deal allowing Nvidia to sell its H200 chip into China, with the US government taking a 25% cut of the revenue.
The deal was announced in December, but as recently as February, Nvidia's finance chief told analysts the company had approval for a small number of units but had yet to generate any revenue. Tuesday's announcement changes that. Huang said the supply chain is "getting fired up," and has previously estimated the Chinese market for these chips could be worth $50 billion a year. None of that potential revenue is included in Nvidia's current financial forecasts.
Apple's pricing trap for rivals
Apple's situation in China is less dramatic but equally instructive. A 23% surge against a falling market means Apple is not riding a consumer recovery. It is taking share from competitors who are under pressure it is not.
The mechanism is straightforward. The iPhone 17's base model qualifies for Chinese state subsidies. E-commerce discounts have lowered the effective price further.
Meanwhile, rising memory chip costs have forced Android rivals OPPO and vivo to raise prices on existing models, an unusual move that signals their margin pressure is severe enough that they cannot wait for a new product cycle to adjust. Apple, with its tighter grip on its supply chain, is absorbing those same rising costs rather than passing them on. It is using the gap to pull customers across.
What comes next
Trump is due in Beijing later this month for a summit with Xi Jinping, the first US presidential visit since his first term in 2017. Expectations are low. Analysts expect little beyond some commercial purchases and a framework for further talks, with China seeking clarity on the direction of US technology export restrictions above all else.
For Apple and Nvidia, the summit's outcome matters, but neither company is waiting on it. They are both making money in China right now by working around the uncertainty rather than waiting for it to resolve. When the political backdrop is this unstable, the companies with the strongest structural positions tend not to ask for permission.