Experts warn Nvidia's China chip sales are shaping Trump's AI policy

Export controls were not on the agenda at the recent summit between US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping. The two sides extended a fragile trade truce by only two months, and analysts expect new US restrictions could end it and push China to cut rare earth exports.

Behind the stalled talks, Nvidia emerged with a significant gain: China is weighing whether to relax its own controls and let its largest AI companies import millions more of the company's restricted chips over the coming year.

What Beijing is considering

Sources familiar with the talks told The Information that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked Alibaba and ByteDance to share plans for buying Nvidia's RTX Pro 5500 chips. The hardware is gaming gear, but Beijing asked the firms to explain how they intend to use it, expecting the chips could go into servers powering the country's most in-demand AI models. Nvidia is preparing to ship the first orders in December.

From “What the hell is Nvidia?” to Mar-a-Lago

Nvidia has pushed to reopen China's market since Trump took office. CEO Jensen Huang blames US export controls for cutting Nvidia's share of China's advanced AI chip market from about 95 percent to zero. Trump entered office asking “What the hell is Nvidia?”, tightened restrictions inherited from Joe Biden by banning H200 exports, and even considered breaking the company up. After a dinner with Huang at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump said he “learned the facts of life”, he lifted the H200 controls despite warnings from lawmakers and national security experts.

Stephen Witt, author of “The Thinking Machine”, told NPR that Trump's claim that AI destroying humanity is a “hoax” repeats “exactly Jensen's talking points”. Witt called Huang “the president's most influential adviser on technology issues”. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that “the president is completely aligned with Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia”.

Why critics worry

China's delayed approval of H200 sales left Nvidia's China business weak: those chips made up less than 1 percent of its data center revenue in the most recent quarter, and unsold H200 stock cost the company a $400 million hit in the first half of 2026. If Beijing approves the gaming chips, ByteDance plans to order 1 million of them.

Andrew Yoon of the AI safety nonprofit CivAI told CNBC that Nvidia “is the most aggressive in terms of, let's just make money”. Some experts fear looser controls on both sides could divert too many chips to China and squeeze the supply US data centers rely on. Nvidia's spokesperson countered that relaxing curbs on “outdated” gaming chips released “nearly a half a decade ago” only helps US firms blocked from hardware that cannot train AI.

Ro Khanna, the top Democrat on the House select committee on China, told The Guardian that Trump could have pushed Xi to create technical working groups on AI risks but “has no interest in doing that”.