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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang visited Beijing on Thursday, after new curbs from Washington on the chipmaker’s China sales sent its shares tumbling.
According to two people familiar with his travel schedule, Huang met Nvidia clients, including the founder of generative AI start-up DeepSeek, to discuss new chip designs for Chinese customers.
He then held separate talks with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng, according to one person familiar with the meeting.
Huang said “China was a very important market for Nvidia” and expressed hope his company could “continue co-operating” with the country, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
On Tuesday, Nvidia said it expected a $5.5bn hit to earnings from new 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 is not willing to give up on the China market and is considering designing yet another 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 year, 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.
According to a person familiar with the matter, Huang’s latest visit to China visit came shortly after the State Council agreed to a meeting request from Nvidia earlier this week.
Huang met DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in Beijing, two people familiar with the trip said, to discuss how to design next-generation chips for China that meet client needs and regulatory requirements from both the US and China sides.
DeepSeek, an Nvidia customer, in January rattled US tech stocks when it unveiled a competitive AI model that achieved a similar performance to US rivals, but appeared to be trained at a fraction of the cost.
Nvidia’s effort to maintain its sales in China come as the country has been forced to prepare 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 build up its domestic semiconductor industry and directed domestic tech companies to buy Huawei’s AI chip. The Chinese tech champion is working to address difficulties in using its Ascend AI chip for model training, which has left domestic companies reliant on Nvidia.
Huang has called Huawei “China’s ‘single most formidable tech company’”.
Nvidia has faced regulatory scrutiny in both 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 seeking approval for the purchase of an Israeli networking company.
The trip comes as US lawmakers are demanding information from Nvidia on whether DeepSeek was able to obtain export-controlled chips.
Nvidia declined to comment on Huang’s trip.
