(Bloomberg) — Days after a White House meeting with President Donald Trump, Jensen Huang was being hailed by an audience on a stage in Beijing.
On his third trip to China this year, the world’s ninth richest man announced this week that Nvidia Corp. will resume China sales of its H20 chips, an abrupt policy reversal from the Trump administration. He also opened a major supply-chain expo in Beijing — speaking briefly in Mandarin, as requested by his host, former Chinese Commerce Ministry official Ren Hongbin — with a clarion call for closer business ties.
The episode showed that Huang, 62, is becoming increasingly adept at pulling off a delicate diplomatic dance that is both benefiting his company and helping the world’s biggest economies manage their differences.
The Nvidia boss has long been leery of politics. In January, he was among the few American tech tycoons who stayed away from Trump’s inauguration ceremony, spending that week in China where his firm has some 4,000 staff, and Taiwan. Yet trying to keep Washington and Beijing from escalating a rivalry that’s weaponized his technology has now become a key part of his job description — whether he likes it or not.
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With Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping yet to set a date for an in-person summit that’s expected in the coming months, a broader question is whether he could emerge as some sort of go-between. While Tesla’s Elon Musk and Apple Inc. chief Tim Cook have fallen out of favor with Trump to differing degrees, Huang has maintained warm ties with the unpredictable US leader.
“Huang is obviously on good terms with Trump administration. Yet his chip business is one of the biggest flashpoints between Beijing and Washington,” said Feng Chucheng, founding partner of Hutong Research. “It’s possible the two leaders may want such a channel for messaging, but is he willing to?”
Nvidia declined to comment.
How much access Beijing will grant Huang remains to be seen. During this trip, the chip boss sat down with Vice Premier He Lifeng, who is spearheading China’s trade war negotiations, and Commerce Minister Wang Wentao, but wasn’t given an audience with the top echelon of leaders. “It would be an honor to see President Xi,” Huang said. “I just wasn’t invited.”
Shuttle diplomacy has become de rigueur for corporate chiefs aiming to retain major business in the world’s biggest economies, given the political sensitivities and suspicions in each capital city toward the other. Apple’s Cook similarly has regularly visited China while seeking to engage with the Trump administration.
It’s unclear how much sway such figures have, beyond smoothing a path for their own business operations. Expectations for Musk — whose EV giant has a significant presence in China — to become a back channel in US-China ties never materialized. The Tesla boss stayed quiet on matters involving Beijing this year, before leaving the Trump administration.
While Huang has little political ambition, he has argued to successive US administrations that tightening a chip-export ban would only incentivize China to foster a homegrown industry. His rationale is simple: Allowing Nvidia to compete with China’s champion, Huawei Technologies Co., on its own turf is essential to America winning the AI race.
China’s Commerce Ministry said Friday the US should abandon its “zero-sum mindset” and scrap its “unjustified” trade restrictions when commenting on Washington lifting the H20 chips ban.
Huang, whose company became the first to hit a $4 trillion market valuation this month, brushed off speculation that he influenced Trump’s recent U-turn. Speaking to a group of reporters in Beijing, he said: “I don’t think I changed his mind.”
Cultural Sensitivity
Over the years, Huang has demonstrated himself to be well-versed in local Chinese culture and able to make himself popular on trips. Photos of him dancing in a vest with a flowery print — traditional to China’s northeast — during his company’s annual party last year went viral online in the Asian country.
Chinese state media outlets this week highlighted the good news on H20 chips, which still fall short of Nvidia’s most cutting-edge products. For his part, the Taiwan-born naturalized American showered praise on Chinese tech researchers and entrepreneurs, name-dropping local AI companies, posing for photos with Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun and telling reporters it’s the American people’s “misfortune” that Xiaomi electric vehicles aren’t available in the US.
“He’s a skillful CEO who, like the Apple CEO and others, must navigate the China and non-China technology ecosystems to the maximum extent possible,” said Kurt Tong, a former US consul general in Hong Kong and a partner at the Asia Group.
The Taiwan-born billionaire has steered clear of controversy. He was quick to clarify his remarks after referring to the self-ruled democracy as a “country” last year while touring one of the island’s night markets. That reference displeased Beijing, with a spokesperson at the office handling Taiwan affairs calling on him to “read up on the history.”
Days later, Huang said: “I wasn’t making a geopolitical comment, but thanking all of our technology partners here for all their support and contributions to the industry.”
That stands in contrast to fellow tech titan Musk who publicly said Taiwan should effectively be under Beijing’s control, aligning with Xi’s view of the matter.
Huang has limited his comments on the Taiwan Strait to how US chip restrictions could influence Beijing’s calculations on a possible invasion of the island where much of the world’s semiconductors, including Nvidia’s, are made. “You got to ask yourself, at what point do they just say, ‘F—- it. Let’s go to Taiwan. We’ve got nothing to lose.’ At some point they will have nothing to lose,” he told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2023.
Tech is a particularly sensitive sector for a CEO to act as a bridge between the two nations, because of a strategic desire on both sides to decouple in the long term, said Dominic Chiu, senior analyst at Eurasia Group. But there may still be a more immediate opening.
“In the short run, in the midst of these negotiations and transactional deals and back-and-forth, there could be some space for these tech firms to be bridges,” Chiu said.
–With assistance from Ian King, Josh Xiao, Lucille Liu, Jessica Sui, Colum Murphy, Luz Ding and Alan Wong.
(Update with comments from China’s Commerce Ministry in the 12th paragraph.)
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