When Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, joined a group of US business leaders traveling with President Trump to Beijing this week at the last minute, many took it as a sign that the company’s long-stagnant sales in China were about to make progress.
But when the summit between Mr. Trump and China’s Supreme Leader Xi Jinping ended on Friday, the fate of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips in China was no clearer than before.
Even Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, seemed uncertain about Nvidia’s future in China, saying in an interview with Bloomberg News on Friday that it was up to Beijing whether Chinese companies would buy more from the U.S. chip giant.
Last December, President Trump approved Nvidia, the world’s leading chip maker, to sell one of its most powerful AI chips, the H200, to China. But since then, the Chinese government has not yet acknowledged any purchases and no H200s have been sold.
Instead, Beijing has pressured Chinese companies to rely on domestic technology from chipmakers such as Huawei.
Just before Mr. Trump met with Mr. Xi, China reached a milestone in its long-running quest for technological self-sufficiency. Chinese startup DeepSeek said for the first time that its latest AI model has been optimized to run on Huawei chips.
Mr. Huang has long warned that this change is coming. He predicted that Chinese AI companies will soon rely on Chinese hardware rather than American technology, eroding US influence over China’s AI development.
U.S. officials did not appear to push the issue during their trip to China this week.
The decision whether to buy the H200 “will be a sovereign decision for China,” Mr. Greer said in an interview. “Obviously we think it could help them in the long run, but that’s something they’ll have to decide.”
For years, Washington has used export controls to slow China’s progress in advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, and analysts expected Chinese officials to voice their frustration with the restrictions this week.
Despite Mr. Huang’s presence in Beijing, Mr. Greer said, the two sides did not discuss chip export controls at the meeting.
China is determined to make advanced chips at home and sees the U.S. tech industry as a threat to that effort, he said.
“If we’re ahead of the game like we are on AI chips, sometimes they feel like it can stunt their own growth,” he said.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One on Friday night, Mr. Trump said that while China needed advanced chips, it had backed off the H200 purchase so far to focus on domestic technology. He struck an optimistic note that would not hold true for long.
“They decided no, they want to try to develop their own,” Trump said. A problem arose, he said. “I think something might happen to it.
