Nvidia CEO visits China amid US AI chip ban

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited Beijing on Thursday after Washington’s new restrictions on the chipmaker’s sales caused its shares to fall.

Huang’s visit comes at a time when Beijing and Washington are facing off in a tariff war, and Nvidia is one of the US technology leaders bearing the brunt of the trade war. Huang had dinner with US President Donald Trump a week earlier.

According to local media and a person familiar with his travel itinerary, Huang arrived in China on Wednesday to meet with officials and technology leaders to discuss the consequences of Donald Trump’s move to further restrict sales in the country.

According to a post on Chinese state media’s social media site Weibo, Huang’s trip took place at the invitation of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a government-affiliated trade group heavily involved in facilitating US-China business relations.

The Financial Times reported that while in Beijing, Huang also met with Liang Wenfeng, the founder of Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek, to discuss developments in the artificial intelligence chip industry.

The post, which showed Huang smiling for the cameras, noted that the visit came after the US President had previously said he wanted to continue working with China.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced export restrictions on Nvidia’s H20 chip—a lower-powered version of its artificial intelligence products specifically designed for the Chinese market to comply with US controls.

Nvidia had been under the impression that it could continue selling the chip to China after the meeting between Huang and Trump at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The chipmaker had told major Chinese customers such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent that their H20 purchases would not be affected.

Nvidia announced yesterday that it would take a $5.5 billion hit to earnings as a result of the new controls.

The visit also comes as US lawmakers are requesting information from Nvidia about whether Chinese artificial intelligence group DeepSeek has been able to obtain export-controlled chips.