(Bloomberg/Mackenzie Hawkins) — US President Donald Trump said he didn’t discuss approving sales of Nvidia Corp.’s Blackwell chips to China with his counterpart Xi Jinping, dampening speculation that Washington will allow exports of the powerful AI accelerators to the world’s largest semiconductor market.
Trump said he and Xi talked about Nvidia’s access to China in general and that the chipmaker would continue conversations with Beijing, which has discouraged domestic firms from using less-advanced Nvidia processors that Washington already approved for sale. “We did discuss chips,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “They’re going to be talking to Nvidia and others about taking chips.”
Asked specifically whether the US would authorize exports of downgraded Blackwell accelerators, a possibility Trump first suggested months ago, the US president said “we’re not talking about the Blackwell.”
Trump’s comments came just a day after he said he’d discuss Nvidia’s Blackwell lineup with Xi, as part of broader talks aimed at a sweeping trade deal between the world’s two largest economies. Those earlier remarks triggered hope among investors — and fear among many China hawks — that Washington would green-light sales of better American AI chips than China’s ever been able to access. That helped drive a rally that made Nvidia the first company to hit a $5 trillion value.
China is the biggest market for semiconductors, and Nvidia’s products are the industrial standard for training and running large-language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The Blackwell family of chips is Nvidia’s top offering, with capabilities that far exceed those of processors the US effectively banned from sale to China in 2022. Policymakers under Trump and his predecessor have several times escalated those controls, imposed over concerns that advanced AI could lend Beijing a military edge.
Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has lobbied aggressively against the US restrictions, which he says will only aid the rise of Chinese chip champions like Huawei Technologies Co. Shipping Blackwell chips to China would have marked a major win for the tech chief, a significant concession to Beijing, and a dramatic departure from the Trump administration’s own stated approach to tech competition with the Asian country.
Huang’s already notched several wins under the Trump administration, for exports to China and elsewhere. Over the summer, American authorities issued licenses for shipments of Nvidia’s H20 processors, deliberately downgraded hardware that Trump’s team had restricted from sale to the Asian country just months prior.
But Beijing, which has repeatedly asked in trade talks for the US to abandon its export controls, has strongly discouraged companies and agencies from using those accelerators. Chinese authorities, who’ve long pushed domestic firms to use homegrown AI hardware, cited security concerns with Nvidia accelerators that the chipmaker has tried to assuage.
“The president has licensed us to ship to China, but China has blocked us from being able to ship to China,” Huang told reporters this week at a company event in Washington. “They’ve made it very clear that they don’t want Nvidia to be there right now.”
Trump’s Thursday comments signal an effort to clear that blockade, which has captured not just H20 chips but also another Nvidia semiconductor that can be used for AI applications. “I said that’s really between you and Nvidia,” Trump said Thursday, referring to his conversation with Xi on the sidelines of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea. “But we’re sort of the arbitrator or the referee.”
The rules of the road, though, are still unclear. Weeks after Trump officials said they’d issue the H20 permits, the president said the US will also be taking a 15% cut from Nvidia’s resulting revenue — an unprecedented arrangement for which officials have yet to establish a legal framework.
It’s also unclear how many H20 chips the US administration has approved, or plans to approve, for sale — a question with significant bearing on the economic opportunity for Nvidia, which wrote down billions of dollars in revenue after the initial H20 curbs and no longer includes China sales in its financial forecasts.
Trump’s discussions with Xi, he said, concerned “a lot of the chips. And that’s good for us.”
Nvidia argues that exports to China would boost the American tech ecosystem at Huawei’s expense, limiting the Chinese tech giant’s access to revenue and know-how that would help it compete on the global stage. While that line of reasoning has taken hold with some US officials like White House AI czar David Sacks, many others worry that adding to the Asian country’s overall computing capabilities poses a significant national security threat.
The future for Blackwell chips, meanwhile, remains to be seen. Trump said in August he’d be open to letting Nvidia sell a Blackwell chip that’s “enhanced in a negative way,” which he described at the time as taking “30% to 50% off of it.” Nvidia has not released any technical specifications for such a semiconductor, and Huang said this week that the chipmaker has not requested export permits for Blackwell processors.
(Updates with full comments from second paragraph.)
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