Trump signals he could speak to China's Xi about Nvidia's 'super duper' chips

U.S. President Donald Trump plans to discuss Nvidia's advanced AI chips with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their widely expected meeting on Thursday, he told a media scrum Wednesday. 

While taking questions regarding his high-stakes meeting with Xi, Trump signaled that Nvidia's Blackwell AI processors could be discussed. 

"We'll be speaking about Blackwell, it's the super duper chip," he said. Nvidia's "super duper chip" appeared to refer to the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip — its most advanced AI chip.

More broadly, Nvidia's Blackwell architecture represents its latest generation of AI chips, or 'graphics processing units,' used to train and run large language models.

Trump went on to laud Nvidia's Blackwell chips, claiming that they are about a decade ahead of any other chip.

"That's our country. We're about 10 years ahead of anybody else in chips — in the highly sophisticated chips. I think we may be talking about that with President Xi." 

The comments come as Nvidia faces an uncertain future in China, once a lucrative market for the AI darling.

While export controls have long prevented Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI products to China, Washington had rolled back restrictions on the chipmaker's less advanced, made-for-China H20 chips in July. 

Trump later indicated that he might also allow a downgraded version of Nvidia's Blackwell chips into China.

But in a surprise move, Beijing recently stepped in to prevent its companies from importing Nvidia's chips amid national security concerns regarding the company's technology. As a result, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month that the company is currently "100% out of China" and has no market share there.

However, many analysts view the Chinese ban as likely temporary, saying Beijing could be using Nvidia's access to its market as leverage in its trade negotiations with the Trump administration.

Despite Trump's remarks about Nvidia's "super duper chip," it seems more likely that a less advanced version would be on the table.

In August, Reuters reported Nvidia was developing a new chip for China — dubbed the B30A — that would be more powerful than the H20 and built on the Blackwell architecture.

Such a chip would hypothetically help Nvidia fend off growing competition from domestic players like Huawei, as Beijing accelerates its efforts to develop a self-sufficient AI environment.

However, semiconductor experts said a resumption of H20 exports, or an additional pathway for the B30A, would also help China's AI ecosystem more broadly and undermine Washington's strategy to curb Chinese access to cutting-edge computing, which began ramping up in 2022.

A report released earlier this week from the Institute for Progress, a U.S. think tank, argued that allowing B30A exports to China would dramatically shrink America's current AI compute advantage over China.

Huang, who has long lobbied against U.S. chip restrictions, will reportedly be in South Korea at the same time as Trump this week. The Nvidia CEO is expected to make announcements with local partners, which Huang said would hopefully be "delightful to the people of Korea and really delightful to President Trump."