With President Trump’s global trade war rapidly morphing into a tit-for-tat tariff-related one-upmanship between the US and China, NVIDIA is now finding itself at the very center of this maelstrom, replete with opportunities and challenges that such a strategic position almost always entails.
We got a glimpse of NVIDIA’s elevated negotiating power recently when it was able to win an unfettered exemption from the Trump administration to continue selling AI-critical H20 GPUs in China.
Now, UBS is out with a fresh note that leverages Taiwan’s surging exports – presumably boosted by tariff-related pull-ins – to quantify the upside for NVIDIA’s data center sales in the April-ending quarter.
To wit, UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri notes that Taiwan’s exports of Automatic Data Processing (ADP) equipment ex laptops clocked-in at $12.03 billion for March 2025, corresponding to a month-over-month (MoM) growth of 20.6 percent relative to February’s export figure of $9.97 billion.
Arcuri points out that March is historically the strongest export month for Taiwan, typically recording MoM growth of mid-20 percent over February’s figures. This means that Taiwan’s export figures for March were a tad weaker than what historical analogs would imply. The UBS analyst, however, takes pains to note that Taiwan just witnessed its “strongest February in over a decade (+14% M/M relative to -15% historical seasonality).” The analyst then asserts:
“Assuming April constitutes a “normal” 36% of total F1Q (Apr Q) would imply ~$34B of exports – a large step-up of ~58% Q/Q – although it is unclear to what extent this reflects tariff pull-ins rather than underlying strength.”
Basically, if Taiwan’s April exports follow their historical pattern, the country would likely record a quarter-over-quarter export growth of 58 percent. According to Arcuri, this level of exports would imply an 18 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in NVIDIA’s data center revenues:
“We model NVDA’s data center revenue up 18% Q/Q to $42B in Apr Q.”
While the UBS analyst cautions that Taiwan’s export data has not been predictive of NVIDIA’s data center sales for the past few quarters, his overall thesis is bolstered by TSMC recently reporting “above-seasonality” sales for March 2025.
Of course, this comes as Citi has just lowered its total GPU sales forecast for NVIDIA by 3 percent for the ongoing CY 2025, and 5 percent for the CY 2026, citing “mostly lower Microsoft capex concerns and higher risk of pause in enterprise investments amid uncertainty around the global economy due to ongoing trade war.”
Meanwhile, Lynx Equity believes that NVIDIA, “with its AI servers sourcing most components outside the US and assembled by system integrators based in Taiwan, has built a multi-layered strategy to avoid nearly all US tariffs.”
Moreover, the research house believes that China is unlikely to subject NVIDIA to punitive tariffs, “given China’s continued dependence on NVDA products.” Accordingly, Lynx Equity now expects NVIDIA to promptly return to its recent highs.
