Nvidia CEO says no ‘active discussions’ on selling Blackwell chip to China

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By Wen-Yee Lee

Taipei (Reuters) -Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Friday that there were “no active discussions” about selling the company’s state-of-the-art Blackwell chips to China.

Blackwell is Nvidia’s current flagship artificial intelligence chip that the Trump administration has so far prevented from being sold to China, for fear it would aid the Chinese military and domestic AI industry.

While there was speculation last week that talks between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea could end with a deal to allow a scaled-down version of the Blackwell to be sold in China, so far there have been no signs of an agreement.

“Currently, we are not planning to ship anything to China,” Huang said, soon after arriving in the city of Tainan for his fourth public visit to Taiwan this year.

“It’s up to China when they would like Nvidia products to go back to serve the Chinese market, I look forward to them changing their policy,” he added.

The U.S. has allowed Nvidia to sell its H20 chip in China, but Huang has repeatedly said over the past month that China does not want Nvidia in the country, so its market share of the advanced AI chip market is zero.

Huang, in remarks seen on a live broadcast by Taiwan’s Formosa TV News network, also said he was in Taiwan for a day and a half to visit long-time partner TSMC and participate in the company’s sports day.

“Business is very strong,” he said. “So I came back to encourage my TSMC friends.”

When asked about Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s plan to build a fab, Huang said that building advanced semiconductor manufacturing capabilities like TSMC does is extremely hard, but emphasized that “it’s a very important technology and the demand is extremely high.” 

Huang also clarified his recent comments, quoted in a Financial Times report, saying China would win the AI race. 

“That’s not what I said,” Huang said. “What I said was that China has very good AI technology. They have many AI researchers.”

He said 50% of the world’s AI researchers are in China and the most popular open-source AI models also come from there.

“So they’re moving very very fast,” he said. “The United States has to continue to move incredibly fast; otherwise, the world is very competitive, so we have to run fast.”

(Reporting by Wen-Yee Lee in Taipei; Editing by Jacqueline Wong and Thomas Derpinghaus)