Nvidia Chief Executive Confers with Trump and Gains Approval to Resume AI Chip Sales in China

It’s been a very busy week for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. After meeting with President Donald Trump and senior officials in Beijing in recent days, Huang has secured a major victory for his AI-chip empire.

On Monday, Nvidia announced that the U.S. government will allow it to resume sales of its H20 AI chips in China. The company still needs to secure official licensing approval from the Trump administration, but officials have reportedly assured Nvidia “that licenses will be granted.” The company said in a blog post that it’s already filing the necessary applications and plans to begin shipments soon.

The H20 chip is a dialed-down version of Nvidia’s powerhouse H100 semiconductor, built specifically for the Chinese market to comply with U.S. export restrictions. Nvidia is still banned from selling its most advanced chips to China due to national security concerns. The restrictions are also part of a broader effort to maintain America’s edge in AI.

Back in April, those curbs tightened even more. After the unexpected success of the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, the U.S. halted exports of the modified H20 chips, costing Nvidia potentially billions of dollars in sales. 

But now, it appears all but certain that Huang has managed to convince Trump that selling to China is actually a win for America. According to the company, during Huang’s meeting with Trump and other U.S. policymakers, he reaffirmed “NVIDIA’s support for the Administration’s effort to create jobs, strengthen domestic AI infrastructure and onshore manufacturing, and ensure that America leads in AI worldwide.”

Huang has also made the case that if the future is AI, it’s better that it runs on American hardware. 

“General-purpose, open-source research and foundation models are the backbone of AI innovation,” Huang told reporters in D.C. “We believe that every civil model should run best on the U.S. technology stack, encouraging nations worldwide to choose America.”  

This news comes just days after Nvidia made history, becoming the first company ever to reach a $4 trillion market cap. 

Founded in 1993, Nvidia’s chips were mostly known for decades for their use in gaming and computer graphics; however, they have now become the backbone in some major tech advances including AI, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.

These victories have also paid off personally for Huang, who is now the eighth-richest person in the world. His fortune has already surpassed that of old-school business titan Warren Buffett and is just $1 billion shy of catching up to internet pioneer Sergey Brin.