NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang visits China to meet with Chinese customers, including DeepSeek, and government officials about President Trump's new semiconductor export restrictions, and to explore new chips for China

Jensen Huang, CEO of American semiconductor manufacturer NVIDIA, reportedly visited Beijing, China on Thursday, April 17, 2025, following the Trump administration's new restrictions on the sale of NVIDIA products in China. According to the report, CEO Huang met with NVIDIA customers, including generative AI startup DeepSeek, to discuss new chip designs for Chinese companies.

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In order to comply with export restrictions on China imposed under the Joe Biden administration, NVIDIA has developed a performance-reduced AI chip called the H20 and is selling it to China. It is estimated that sales of the H20 alone in China reached more than 2 trillion yen in 2024, but it has been revealed that the US government has tightened semiconductor export restrictions to China and imposed licensing requirements on the H20 as well.

The U.S. government demanded a license to sell NVIDIA's AI chip 'H20' to China, and NVIDIA recorded $5.5 billion in related expenses - GIGAZINE

Despite the increasingly strained relationship between the U.S. and China, Huang doesn't seem ready to give up on the Chinese market. He met with Nvidia customers, including the founder of generative AI startup DeepSeek, according to two people familiar with his travel schedule. He then met separately with China's Vice Premier He Lifeng , the people said.

According to China Central Television, China 's state-run public broadcasting station, Huang said of China, 'It's a very important market for NVIDIA,' and that he 'looks forward to continued cooperation between NVIDIA and China.'

Huang has avoided public meetings with government officials during previous visits to China, and his latest visit comes just after the State Council agreed to a meeting request from Nvidia, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Huang said he met with DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng to discuss how to design next-generation chips to meet the needs of Chinese customers and U.S. government regulatory requirements.

In January 2025, DeepSeek announced its own proprietary inference model, DeepSeek R1 , which can be trained and run at an overwhelmingly lower cost than OpenAI's inference model, o1, bringing a breath of fresh air to the technology industry.

Chinese AI development company 'DeepSeek' is rapidly emerging as a hot topic in the technology industry, and has also ranked first in the App Store's free app rankings - GIGAZINE

As the trade war between the United States and China intensifies, China is encouraging its domestic AI development companies to purchase Huawei's AI chips. However, Huawei's AI chip 'Ascend' series is more difficult to use for training AI models than NVIDIA's AI chips, and Chinese companies are forced to rely on NVIDIA.

Nvidia also officially says that sales of AI chips in China are helping it maintain its global dominance in the AI field, but according to a report in the Wall Street Journal , Nvidia has privately said that 'China is already capable of producing chips comparable to Nvidia's H20,' and is concerned that new restrictions by the U.S. government could erode the company's dominance in the AI industry.