The high-stakes meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing this week ended without any progress on one of the most consequential issues in the US-China technology rivalry: semiconductor export controls. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer confirmed on Friday that the subject was not a major item on the bilateral agenda, dealing a blow to investors and industry watchers who had hoped the summit might unlock a path forward for advanced chip sales to China.
“This was not a major topic of discussion at the bilateral meeting. We did not talk about chip export controls at the meeting,” Greer said in an interview, adding that “15 to 17” US chief executive officers who attended Thursday’s session between Trump and Xi spoke about their own companies’ concerns. The comment was reported by Reuters and picked up by the Taipei Times on Saturday, May 16.
The confirmation carries significant commercial weight. The US had already cleared approximately 10 Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, to purchase Nvidia’s H200 AI chips, with individual purchase caps set at 75,000 chips per approved buyer. Yet not a single delivery has been made. Transactions froze after Chinese companies backed away following direction from Beijing, which is reluctant to deepen dependence on American hardware at a moment when it is trying to build up its domestic chip industry. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate hearing last month that “the Chinese central government has not let them, as of yet, buy the chips, because they’re trying to keep their investment focused on their own domestic industry.”
Jensen Huang’s Last-Minute Beijing Trip Yields No Breakthrough
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was added to the White House delegation at the last minute after Trump personally invited him, boarding the presidential party in Alaska as the group flew to Beijing. Huang expressed hope to China’s state broadcaster CCTV that the summit would strengthen the personal relationship between Trump and Xi and lead to warmer ties. But Greer’s comments suggest that Huang’s presence did not translate into a policy shift.
The value of China’s AI chip market this year could reach $50 billion by Huang’s own estimate. When US export controls were less stringent, Nvidia held roughly 95% of China’s advanced chip market, with Chinese sales representing around 13% of the company’s overall revenue. That position has been dramatically eroded since the Biden administration’s restrictions took effect, and the Trump administration’s H200 approval, announced in December 2025 with additional conditions added in January 2026, has so far produced no actual commerce.
The deal structure itself has added friction. Under a framework assembled by the Trump administration, Washington would take a 25% cut of chip sale revenues, with the chips routed through US territory on their way to China because American law prohibits levying export fees directly. That arrangement has reportedly created additional complications on the Chinese side.
Beijing’s Domestic Chip Strategy Complicates the Calculus
Greer framed Beijing’s reluctance as a sovereign choice rather than a diplomatic failure. “Allowing the H200 imports would be a ‘sovereign decision’ for China,” he said, adding that the calculus around export controls “depends on what threats you see, what’s commercially available worldwide, what the Chinese can already do.” He also acknowledged that Chinese policymakers view US technological leadership in AI chips as a potential threat to their own growth trajectory. “They often see US high tech sometimes as a threat to them because if we’re ahead of the game like we are on AI chips, sometimes they feel that can stop their own growth,” he said.
That framing reflects a genuine tension. Chinese AI firms such as DeepSeek have increasingly touted their reliance on domestic chips, and the country’s largest tech companies, Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, are snapping up Huawei’s Ascend 950PR, which entered mass production in April. Huawei expects its AI chip revenue to jump 60% this year to roughly $12 billion. As domestic alternatives improve, the commercial urgency of importing H200s diminishes from Beijing’s perspective, even as computing power shortages continue to force some Chinese AI models to ration user access.
The broader chip self-sufficiency push is a long-running priority. China has set a target of 80% chip self-sufficiency by 2030, though analysts widely regard that goal as ambitious given the technology gaps that persist at the leading edge. US export controls have slowed China’s ability to scale frontier AI development, but Chinese companies continue finding ways to access advanced computing through overseas infrastructure and other channels. Anthropic’s policy paper, published the same day as the summit, cited a Financial Times report that Alibaba and ByteDance now train flagship models on export-controlled US chips in data centers in Southeast Asia.
US Lawmakers Remain Opposed to Easing Restrictions
The absence of chip controls from the summit agenda also reflects political constraints in Washington. US lawmakers and former officials have consistently argued that selling advanced AI chips to China would allow Beijing to close the gap with the US in frontier AI and advance its military ambitions. Any attempt to relax or renegotiate controls would require extensive interagency coordination and risk backlash from legislators and allies concerned about China’s military-civil fusion strategy.
The Trump administration issued Nvidia export licenses to China in April, raising hopes that the summit might produce a framework for completing actual sales. Those hopes have now been tempered. Greer’s comments suggest that the semiconductor issue remains a domain where neither side is ready to make concessions at the political level, even as commercial pressure mounts on both ends.
For Nvidia, the outcome is a continuation of the status quo: licenses exist on paper, but no chips are moving. The company’s path back into China’s advanced AI market depends on a policy shift that, after this week’s summit, appears no closer than before.