Jensen Huang arrived in Beijing at the invitation of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, according to Chinese state-owned television.
The CEO of tech giant Nvidia is in Beijing this week to shore up regional trade ties following the unveiling of stringent new export requirements on one of its key chips for the Chinese market.
Jensen Huang arrived in Beijing at the invitation of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, according to Chinese state-owned television, where he expressed hope that the company could continue to cooperate with China.
Huang’s visit comes just days after the Trump administration announced new export controls would be applied to Nvidia’s H20 AI chip, the only one that the company offered in China without a special license.
The H20 chip—a watered-down version of Nvidia’s H100 chip—was created in 2022 to comply with the Biden administration’s restrictions on technology exports to China at the time.
Nvidia has said that it expects to take a roughly $5.5 billion hit from the new restrictions, due to covering charges related to inventory and purchase commitments.
The company’s AI chips have been a key focus of U.S. export controls as officials have moved to keep the most advanced chips from being sold to China, as the United States tries to ensure national security and keep ahead in the race to AI dominance.
While the H20 has a reduced core count, which makes it lower performing, it is still able to deliver some key AI capabilities, including in the domain of inference, the process by which a trained AI model draws conclusions from data it hasn’t encountered before.
That has led to scrutiny that the chip could be used to build supercomputers if gathered in great enough numbers.
To that end, a report released this week by the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) alleged that Chinese AI company DeepSeek was able to build its well-known chatbot in part by using 30,000 H20.
What’s more, the select committee said, DeepSeek had ordered thousands more chips, which it would now be ineligible to purchase.
