United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg TV in an interview on Friday (May 15) that US export controls on semiconductor chips were not a major topic of discussions with Chinese officials in Beijing.
The comments suggest a breakthrough on selling Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips to China remains far away, despite Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s last-minute invitation to US President Donald Trump’s Beijing trip this week.
“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, adding that “15 to 17” US CEOs present at Thursday’s meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about their companies’ issues.
Reuters reported that the US had cleared around 10 Chinese companies to buy H200s, including Alibaba, Tencent and Bytedance, but not a single delivery has been made so far.
The Trump administration approved H200 exports to China in December, and added further conditions in January.
Greer added that allowing the H200 imports would be a “sovereign decision” for China.
“They’re fluid, right? They change over time. It depends on what threats you see, what’s commercially available worldwide, what the Chinese can already do,” said Greer.
“And so you want to make sure you strike a balance between national security, protecting high tech, but also making sure that we’re benefiting from overseas markets. And so those are the kinds of things that went into the H200 decision as to whether the Chinese are going to buy or not.”
