Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined President Donald Trump’s China trip after a late invitation, putting the chipmaker inside a closely watched Beijing summit.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has joined President Donald Trump’s trip to China after the president called him and asked him to take part, adding one of the world’s most closely watched chip executives to a high-stakes U.S. business delegation in Beijing.
Nvidia confirmed to CNBC that Huang will visit China this week. A person familiar with the situation told CNBC that Trump called Huang after seeing coverage that the Nvidia chief was absent from the delegation, and that Huang flew to Alaska to board Air Force One.
The late addition is notable because Huang was not included on an earlier list of executives expected to accompany Trump. Nvidia’s business in China has been constrained by U.S. export controls on advanced chips used to train artificial intelligence models, making Huang’s presence at the summit a closely watched signal even if no immediate policy shift has been announced.
Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday and Friday. He is bringing more than a dozen U.S. executives to Beijing, a group that had already included leaders from Qualcomm, Tesla, Apple and Boeing, according to the earlier reporting.
“Jensen is attending the summit at the invitation of President Trump to support America and the administration’s goals,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Trump later said in a social media post that Huang was on Air Force One and denied reports that the Nvidia executive had not been invited. Trump also wrote that opening China to U.S. businesses would be his “first request” to Xi.
Huang’s participation puts Nvidia closer to the center of talks at a time when the company remains caught between demand for its AI chips and Washington’s limits on sales to China. Nvidia’s most advanced processors have faced tighter U.S. restrictions on China sales over the past four years. The company said in February that versions of its chips approved by the U.S. government had still not been allowed into China.
China, meanwhile, has been pushing to develop its own chips and AI models that do not depend on Nvidia. A recent article in the Chinese Communist Party’s official journal said local companies had slowed development because of U.S. chip restrictions while also pointing to Nvidia’s dominance in the global market for graphics processing units.
Before the late change, Huang had said it would be a privilege to join the trip if asked. His absence from the original delegation had been read by some analysts as a sign that Nvidia might have little to gain from the summit while export controls remain unresolved.
Carlos Gutierrez, a former U.S. commerce secretary, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” that Huang’s presence was positive but did not mean an export-control deal was close. “I still believe that we are far away from a deal on export controls,” he said.
For now, Huang’s addition changes the optics of the delegation more than the known policy picture. The next test is whether Trump’s meetings with Xi produce any concrete movement for U.S. businesses in China, including companies most exposed to the technology rivalry between the two countries.
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