Air Force One touched down in China today as a hastily convened U.S.-China summit begins this week. Alongside President Donald Trump on the flight to Beijing is a cavalcade of Silicon Valley executives.
Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Dina Powell McCormick, and representatives from Qualcomm, Micron, and Cisco are among those who’ve been eating the insignia-emblazoned M&Ms on the presidential plane. But one name stood out for almost not making the trip: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the company whose chips have become foundational to the AI race.
Huang was only confirmed as part of the delegation hours before departure, a notable last-minute addition given Nvidia’s increasingly central role in the technological standoff between Washington and Beijing.
“Jensen’s absence reflected a disconnect between Washington’s confidence in Nvidia as leverage and China’s willingness to endure pain for semiconductor self-reliance,” says Rui Ma, a China tech analyst and creator of Tech Buzz China.
China, meanwhile, is showing signs that its domestic semiconductor industry is gaining momentum despite U.S. restrictions. The country’s integrated circuit export data for April showed shipments doubling year over year in value to $31.1 billion. “Chinese semis are more confident now they can figure out [how to catch up to the U.S.] in a reasonable amount of time,” says Ma.
The initial executive list excluding Huang may itself have been intended as a signal to China. Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute specializing in China, says the Trump administration views access to computing power as too strategically important to compromise, particularly as AI systems become more capable. “Better to keep American industry out of the CCP’s crosshairs, and leave the substance of policy negotiations to the governments,” Fedasiuk says.
Personal politics likely played a role as well. Huang has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s approach to U.S. chip export restrictions, arguing that cutting off Chinese access to Nvidia chips will only accelerate China’s efforts to develop a competing hardware stack, potentially backfiring on the United States. Huang even borrowed Trumpian language, calling it a “loser mentality” that jeopardized U.S. supremacy.
Huang’s last-minute inclusion in the delegation could signal that Nvidia’s relationship with China is becoming part of a broader geopolitical negotiation. “It might be that Trump sees Nvidia’s access to China and China’s access to Nvidia’s chips as something he can bring to the table in relation to other issues like Chinese help on Iran,” says William Matthews, senior research fellow for China and the world in the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House.