US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday (Oct 29) that he will speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping about Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell artificial intelligence chip at their expected meeting on Thursday.
Sales of the US firm’s high-end AI chips to China, which accounted for 13 per cent of its revenue in the past financial year, have been a key sticking point in protracted trade talks between the world’s two largest economies this year.
Beijing has long been irked by Washington’s export controls that ban Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to China. The US has justified these restrictions by alleging the Chinese military would use the chips to increase its capabilities.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Gyeongju, South Korea, Trump praised Nvidia’s current flagship Blackwell model as the “super-duper chip” and said he might speak to Xi about it, without elaborating.
“I think we may be talking about that with President Xi,” Trump said, adding he was “very optimistic” about his meeting with Xi, the first since he returned to the White House.
UNCERTAIN CHIP EXPORT CONTROLS
The second Trump administration has swung back and forth on allowing Nvidia’s advanced chips into China, vacillating on whether access would make its superpower rival more dependent on the US technology or give its military and tech companies a competitive boost.
In April, it ordered Nvidia to stop sales of the H20 chip, made specifically for the Chinese market, prompting the company to prepare a less powerful version that was nevertheless based on its newest Blackwell architecture.
Washington lifted the H20 sales ban three months later as part of negotiations with China on rare earths exports.
Trump also said in August he would allow Nvidia to sell its H20 chips to China in exchange for the US government receiving a 15 per cent cut of the company’s sales of some advanced chips in that country, opening the door to allowing the firm to sell more powerful chips than the H20 model.
But even after the revenue sharing deal, Nvidia said it has not sent any H20 chips to China, as the US has yet to come up with rules on how to get the payment and China has discouraged domestic firms from purchasing the California-based company’s chips.
CEO Jensen Huang, who is expected to meet Trump on Wednesday and discuss the Blackwell, said on Tuesday his company had not applied for US export licenses to send its newest chips to China because of the Chinese position.
“They’ve made it very clear that they don’t want Nvidia to be there right now,” he said during the company’s developers’ event, adding it needs access to the China market to fund US-based research and development.
“I hope that will change in the future because I think China is a very important market.”
Beijing has put pressure on Chinese firms to buy and further develop domestic chips in response to US export controls targeting the sale of Nvidia chips to China.
Despite that pressure, Chinese developers still want Nvidia’s chips due to constrained supplies of products from domestic rivals such as Huawei, Reuters has previously reported.
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