Beijing (AFP) – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang held talks with Chinese leaders in Beijing on Thursday, state media said, days after the United States curbed sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to China. Nvidia this week said it expected a $5.5 billion earnings hit this quarter due to a new US licensing requirement on GPUs (graphics processing units) with bandwidths similar to the H20, the primary chip it could legally sell in China. Shares in the company edged lower on Thursday morning after slumping around seven percent on Wednesday.
In Beijing, Huang met with Vice Premier He Lifeng, telling him that he “looked favourably upon the potential of the Chinese economy,” according to state news agency Xinhua. Huang said he was “willing to continue to plough deeply into the Chinese market and play a positive role in promoting US-China trade cooperation,” Xinhua said. The report cited He as saying that the national economy “has always been fertile soil for foreign enterprises to conduct investment and trade.” “We welcome more US enterprises like Nvidia to dig deeply into the Chinese market and display their industrial advantages and capacities, and thereby win the initiative in global competition,” He reportedly said.
Huang also met Ren Hongbin, head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, telling him that “China is a very important market for Nvidia,” according to state broadcaster CCTV. Nvidia, a key provider of chips used in AI, is trying to maintain sales in China as US President Donald Trump wages a trade war with Beijing. Huang on Thursday expressed hope for “continued cooperation” with China, state media said.
Since Trump took office in January, Washington has imposed new tariffs of up to 145 percent on Chinese imports. Beijing retaliated with 125 percent levies on US goods. Under Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor, Washington had already restricted exports to China of Nvidia’s most sophisticated GPUs, tailored for powering top-end AI models. Huang has said publicly that Nvidia will balance legal compliance and technological advances under Trump — but has vowed that nothing will stop the global advance of AI. “We’ll continue to do that and we’ll be able to do that just fine,” the Taiwan-born entrepreneur told reporters last year. Nvidia generated $17 billion in China in 2024, 13 percent of its total sales.
© 2024 AFP
