By Trevor Hunnicutt
May 15 (Reuters) – U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Friday that U.S. 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 U.S. 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 told Bloomberg TV.
Reuters reported that the U.S. 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.
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump appeared to confirm that China had not approved H200 deliveries “because they chose not to, because they want to try and develop their own”.
Greer added that allowing the H200 imports would be a “sovereign decision” for China.
Trump also confirmed that both leaders discussed artificial intelligence, and the possibility of cooperating on AI safety.
“We’re leading by a lot, but they’re second and they’re very strong, and we talked about possibly working together for guardrails” to curb potential AI threats, he told reporters, without elaborating.
Reuters previously reported that few substantive commitments on the frontier technology would result from the summit, given both sides’ growing AI rivalry and mutual distrust. Pressure to engage has grown after Claude maker Anthropic’s launch of the powerful Mythos model, which China is excluded from using.
DOMESTIC CHIP PUSH
While Chinese AI firms such as DeepSeek increasingly tout their reliance on domestic chips, U.S. 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 recent months but Chinese policymakers are worried about deepening dependencies on U.S. chips, which they view as a supply chain vulnerability.
Hawkish U.S. lawmakers and former Biden administration officials have argued that selling advanced AI chips to China would allow them to catch up with the U.S. in frontier AI and advance China’s military ambitions.
“They often see U.S. 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,” said Greer.
(Reporting by Laurie Chen, David Lawder, Liz Lee and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Kate Mayberry)
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