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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang visited Beijing on Thursday, after recent curbs from Washington on the chipmaker’s China sales sent its shares tumbling.
Based on two people accustomed to his travel schedule, Huang met Nvidia clients, including the founding father of generative AI start-up DeepSeek, to debate recent chip designs for Chinese customers.
He then held separate talks with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng, in line with one person accustomed to the meeting.
Huang said “China was a vital marketplace for Nvidia” and expressed hope his company could “proceed co-operating” with the country, in line with state broadcaster CCTV.
On Tuesday, Nvidia said it expected a $5.5bn hit to earnings from recent US export restrictions on its H20 chip, a lower-powered model that had already been designed to comply with Biden-era controls limiting exports to China.
Huang’s talks indicate that Nvidia isn’t willing to present up on the China market and is considering designing one more chip designed for the market even after its previous efforts have been banned by Washington.
Plans for the Nvidia chief’s visit to Beijing were finalised after Trump’s surprise move to ban the H20 chip.
The group reported $17bn in sales from China last 12 months, but faced growing threats to its business from Beijing even before Trump interceded.
In previous trips to China, Huang has shied away from publicised meetings with high-level officials.
Based on an individual accustomed to the matter, Huang’s latest visit to China visit got here shortly after the State Council agreed to a gathering request from Nvidia earlier this week.
Huang met DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in Beijing, two people accustomed to the trip said, to debate how one can design next-generation chips for China that meet client needs and regulatory requirements from each the US and China sides.
DeepSeek, an Nvidia customer, in January rattled US tech stocks when it unveiled a competitive AI model that achieved an analogous performance to US rivals, but seemed to be trained at a fraction of the fee.
Nvidia’s effort to keep up its sales in China come because the country has been forced to organize to decouple from the US amid Donald Trump’s escalating trade war.
The White House has applied additional tariffs of 145 per cent on imports from China, a level that Beijing has matched in retaliation.
China has pushed to accumulate its domestic semiconductor industry and directed domestic tech firms to purchase Huawei’s AI chip. The Chinese tech champion is working to deal with difficulties in using its Ascend AI chip for model training, which has left domestic firms reliant on Nvidia.
Huang has called Huawei “China’s ‘single most formidable tech company’”.
Nvidia has faced regulatory scrutiny in each Washington and Beijing. China’s antitrust regulator in December announced it was probing Nvidia and reviewing if it had violated commitments made to Beijing when searching for approval for the acquisition of an Israeli networking company.
The trip comes as US lawmakers are demanding information from Nvidia on whether DeepSeek was capable of obtain export-controlled chips.
Nvidia declined to comment on Huang’s trip.
