U.S. officials stopped Nvidia from moving ahead with a major chip export deal to China in the final hours before President Donald Trump met President Xi Jinping in Busan, South Korea, on October 30, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Trump had planned to raise the issue during the summit after Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, pushed for approval to sell the company’s newest Blackwell generation of artificial intelligence chips to Chinese firms. The request was urgent because the chips are critical to training and running advanced AI systems, and the potential sales were worth tens of billions of dollars. Two days before the meeting, Trump reviewed the request with his top national security and trade officials. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, told Trump that exporting the high-end Blackwell processors would boost China’s AI data center capacity and damage U.S. strategic interests. Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary directing trade talks, also opposed the approval. Facing near-total rejection from those advising him, Trump removed the topic from the Xi summit agenda entirely. Huang pushes for market access while officials warn of national security risk Jensen has spoken with Trump often about Nvidia’s access to China, which is one of Nvidia’s largest markets and home to a large share of the world’s AI research talent. At an Nvidia event in Washington before the Busan summit, Jensen emphasized the stakes. He said that about half of the world’s AI researchers work in China and that the U.S. risked permanently losing market share. “I really hope President Trump will help us find a solution,” Jensen said. “Right now we’re in an awkward place.” The Blackwell chips are Nvidia’s most advanced generation of GPUs. The company has said that servers built with the B200 chip can perform training workloads about three times faster than servers using the older H100, and inference tasks about fifteen times faster. Those performance differences matter, because they shape how fast companies can build and deploy AI products. The U.S. first imposed export controls on high-end Nvidia chips to China in 2022, saying they were meant to slow Chinese progress in frontier AI systems. Trump signals conditional openness but rejects top-tier Blackwell For months before the Busan summit, Trump had publicly hinted at a possible approval of a lower-performance version of Blackwell for China, which naturally raised expectations inside Nvidia and among Chinese companies that some export path might reopen. After returning from the Asia trip, Trump changed tone in public. In an interview on “60 Minutes,” he said the U.S. would allow China to do business with Nvidia, but not with its most advanced chip. He said of the Blackwell processors, “We don’t give that chip to other people,” without specifying whether he meant only the top-performing version or also the scaled-down version Nvidia had been drafting. The specifications for the reduced-performance Blackwell chip have not been released. In August, Trump said he would consider a version cut by 30% to 50% in capability. People familiar with Nvidia’s internal timeline said the company could produce such a chip within two or three months of receiving approval. Even if approved, the reduced version faces obstacles. In August, the White House reversed an export ban on an older Nvidia chip on the condition that Nvidia share 15% of revenue from China with the U.S. government. Some lawyers said such an arrangement functioned like a tax that had not been authorized by Congress. Soon after that proposal surfaced, Chinese authorities privately instructed companies not to buy the chip. Nvidia has not sold the H20 chip in China since April, which cost the company billions of dollars in potential revenue. Congressional critics target Huang and link AI race to Cold War stakes Opposition to Nvidia’s efforts has grown in Congress and policy circles. Before the Busan meeting, critics circulated a video of Jensen’s comments in a July CNN interview where he said he did not think it mattered who won the global AI race. The House Select Committee on China reacted sharply. It described Jensen’s statement as “dangerously naive” and compared the situation to nuclear competition during the Cold War. It wrote on X, “This is like arguing that it would not have mattered if the Soviets beat the U.S. to a nuclear weapon.” The Busan summit itself ended with both governments taking steps to reduce tensions in some areas. The U.S. agreed to lower certain tariffs, and China agreed to resume purchases of U.S. soybeans. But the chip issue remained unresolved. For Xi, gaining access to advanced processors is essential to China’s goal of building domestic high-technology industries. Not receiving relief on the chip restrictions delays China’s timeline. For Nvidia, the situation is still fluid. The company remains in discussions with the administration about the modified Blackwell chip. Jensen said in Washington last week that Trump calls him late at night, and he expects the conversation to continue ahead of Trump’s planned trip to China in April. But the top-tier Blackwell chip remains blocked, and the timeline for any alternative is uncertain. Sharpen your strategy with mentorship + daily ideas - 30 days free access to our trading program
