Jensen Huang landed in Beijing on Wednesday and started meeting Chinese tech leaders and government officials just hours before Nvidia shares dropped hard from a new round of chip export curbs.
On Thursday, Huang made public appearances in the capital after the Trump administration blocked the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, a decision that hit the company with a $5.5 billion earnings loss.
The visit came after an invitation from the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, a group tied to Beijing that handles cross-border business.
State media in China posted a picture of Huang smiling and said he wanted Nvidia to continue doing business in the country despite the new restrictions. The photo went up on Weibo, the Chinese social platform, just one day after the U.S. government pulled the plug on Nvidia’s workaround chip sales.
On Tuesday, the White House banned exports of Nvidia’s H20 chip to Chinese companies. The H20 was designed specifically for China to comply with earlier export rules.
It’s a stripped-down version of the company’s AI products. Trump approved the new ban without warning, cutting off a key revenue stream and catching Nvidia off guard.
Jensen had met Trump earlier this month at Mar-a-Lago and came out of that meeting thinking the company could continue selling H20 to its biggest Chinese customers. Nvidia even reassured Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance that their chip orders would go through. After the ban, that promise collapsed.
U.S. lawmakers are also now pushing Nvidia for answers about whether DeepSeek, a Chinese artificial intelligence group, managed to obtain restricted chips. There are ongoing questions in Washington about how far U.S. chips have spread inside China, especially in sensitive sectors.
China stops Boeing deliveries and blacklists U.S. tech as Nvidia gets caught in the middle
Beijing, meanwhile, has gone from hitting back with more tariffs to tightening its grip on minerals, rare-earth elements, and regulatory tools.
Last week, Chinese officials announced they would no longer respond directly to new U.S. tariffs. They said future hikes from Trump would be “a joke” and claimed they’d ignore them altogether.
But that hasn’t meant doing nothing. Instead of matching Trump’s tariff hikes — which reached as high as 245% on some Chinese imports — Beijing has ramped up controls in other sectors.
China has expanded export restrictions on rare-earth minerals, making it harder for U.S. buyers to get the elements needed to build semiconductors, missile defense systems, and solar panels.
It doesn’t stop at minerals. China has also launched antitrust probes into Google and DuPont, and in February, it added dozens of American firms to its so-called “unreliable entity” list.
That list bans or limits companies from operating or investing in China. Names on the list now include Illumina, a U.S. gene-sequencing firm, and PVH, the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger. Then came Tuesday’s hit on Boeing.
According to Bloomberg, Chinese airlines were told to stop accepting new jet deliveries from the U.S. manufacturer. They were also asked to freeze any planned purchases of aircraft parts or systems from American suppliers. This puts even more pressure on Boeing, which has been dealing with production issues and safety investigations in the U.S.
Chinese police also issued arrest warrants this week for three individuals they accuse of carrying out cyberattacks on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency.
State media published the notices and shared the names and photos of the suspects. The Chinese government has now urged businesses and users inside China to stop relying on American-made tech and to switch to domestic alternatives.
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