Jensen Huang, chief executive of the world’s largest company Nvidia, made a dramatic dash to Alaska, where he boarded Air Force One to join President Donald Trump and a whole host of American business leaders en route to Beijing for an important summit with President Xi Jinping of China.
Nvidia shares moved 2% higher in premarket as traders interpret the last-minute inclusion as a signal of good news to come.
Nvidia stock has gained 18% this year, with investors also focusing on next week’s earnings report.
Huang was originally excluded from the list of what Trump hailed as “the incredible gathering of the World’s Greatest Businessmen” but at 11.09 pm Eastern time he posted on his Truth Social site that “Jensen is currently on Air Force One.”On board he found himself sitting beside the likes of Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Kelly Ortberg from Boeing as the delegation flew to China hoping to, in Trump’s words, “open up” the country to American corporates.
Despite trading up to all-time highs this week and a market capitalization of $5.3 trillion, Nvidia’s breathtaking growth has been checked slightly by restrictions on the export of its advanced, artificial intelligence chips to China. Nvidia’s most sophisticated Blackwell chips have been the subject of a controversial export ban by the U.S. government but in March of this year, Huang confirmed that it had been authorized to sell its second-most powerful H200 chips and was restarting production.
The size of the opportunity from which Huang feels like he’s been shut out, is a $50 billion market for AI infrastructure that’s growing rapidly, and Huang has been lobbying aggressively for permission to export to potential Chinese customers.
Interviewed in April on the Dwarkesh podcast Huang was asked directly by the host whether selling these chips to China was “a threat to American companies, to American national security.” Huang’s response was to the effect that China already has immense and highly advanced technological capabilities, “they have an abundance of energy, they have plenty of chips, they’ve got most of the AI researchers.”
His point was that if America didn’t export, the Chinese would likely develop these technologies themselves and build their own ecosystem independently. Far better, Huang contended, that “all the AI developers in the world are developing on the American tech stack.” Better Nvidia sells them the chips, than they build their own, was his logic.
Investors in Nvidia will be excited to see Huang attending the summit now, and hopefully negotiating wider export opportunities for the company.
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