NVIDIA (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang is walking a subtle line. Like other major tech companies, the chip giant is favoring the Trump administration by making substantial investments in U.S. infrastructure. Meanwhile, NVIDIA tried to maintain its profit relationship with international markets such as China, which proves what Huang's latest visit to Beijing proved.
NVIDIA said it will suffer a quarterly blow of $5.5 billion amid the new U.S. export license requirements, affecting its H20 GPU (specifically targeting the Chinese market), Huang arrived in Beijing today (April 17) to meet with local official and technical leaders, including DeepSeek Ceo Ceo Wenfeng Liang.
According to local media reports, the CEO of NVIDIA said in a meeting with Hongbin Ren, the director of the Commission for Promoting International Trade for Huang International Trade, that he hoped to continue to cooperate with Beijing and emphasized the importance of China to NVIDIA's business.
The visit was a time of particularly tense in U.S.-China relations as the two countries remain locked in a escalating trade war. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump imposed a 145% tariff on most Chinese imports, prompting China to impose a 125% tax on U.S. goods.
The Trump administration also recently announced a new curb that would require a semiconductor export license to be shipped to China. NVIDIA said in a SEC filing this week that the licensing requirement would cost the company $5.5 billion in additional costs, which would be reflected in its first-quarter earnings report on May 28. In response to early restrictions on the Biden Administration Chips Act, which prohibits the sale of high-level semiconductors to China to NVIDIA, which will enact new rules to create new rules that have to form new rules. Last year, China accounted for about 13% of NVIDIA's global revenue.
The requirement for the news license will also affect AMD's MI308 chip and could cost the company up to $800 million.
On April 14, NVIDIA promised to invest up to $500 billion in the next four decades to make chips in the United States, praising the announcement as evidence of the “Trump effect in action”, aligning with the president’s agenda to strengthen domestic manufacturing. Other tech giants such as Openai and Apple (AAPL) have made similar investments in recent weeks.
Huang's promise does not mean that he has completely given up on China. In addition to his meeting with REN, he will also meet with China's Vice Prime Minister of Economic Policy Life, who reiterated the country's openness to foreign investment and trade partnerships.
Huang also met with Wenfeng Liang of DeepSeek to discuss next-generation chip designs that meet U.S. regulatory standards, according to the Financial Times.
DeepSeek shook Silicon Valley earlier this year when it unveiled an AI model comparable to the performance of the leading U.S. system – despite developing U.S. systems for a small portion of the cost. Surprise launch prompts renewed calls from U.S. tech leaders to demand stricter export controls to slow China's momentum in AI
