US export controls on semiconductor chips were not a major topic of discussions with Chinese officials in Beijing, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in an interview yesterday.
The comments suggest a breakthrough on selling Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips to China remains far away, despite Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) last-minute invitation to travel with US President Donald Trump to Beijing this week alongside other CEOs of tope US tech companies.
“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 chief executive officers at Thursday’s meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) spoke about their companies’ issues.
Photo: AP
The US had cleared about 10 Chinese companies to buy H200s, including Alibaba (阿里巴巴), Tencent (騰訊) and Bytedance (字節跳動), but not a single delivery has been made so far. The Trump administration approved H200 exports to China in December last year and added further conditions in January.
Allowing the H200 imports would be a “sovereign decision” for China, Greer said.
“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,” he said.
“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,” he added.
While Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firms such as DeepSeek (深度求索) increasingly tout their reliance on domestic chips, US chip curbs continue to choke Beijing’s push for self-sufficiency just when domestic fabs are struggling to scale up output.
Computing power shortages have forced many Chinese AI models to ration user access in the past few months, but Chinese policymakers are worried about deepening dependencies on US chips, which they view as a supply chain vulnerability.
US lawmakers and former officials have argued that selling advanced AI chips to China would allow them to catch up with the US in frontier AI and advance China’s military ambitions.
“They’re making their own determinations. They’re very committed to domestic production,” Greer said.
“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 added.
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