By Louise Matsakis
Publication Date: 2026-01-29 16:10:00
Jensen Huang sure seems to be having a lot of fun in China this week. The Nvidia CEO has been spotted going for a leisurely bike ride and browsing a fresh fruit stand in Shanghai, as well as enjoying beef hot pot at a humble restaurant in Shenzhen.
The carefree tour is not just good optics. Huang has real reason to be feeling upbeat: His long-running lobbying campaign in Washington has, in effect, finally paid off. While Huang was gallivanting around China, multiple news outlets reported that Beijing had approved the sale of hundreds of thousands of powerful Nvidia H200 AI chips to Chinese companies.
According to Reuters, China has agreed to allow ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to buy more than 400,000 of the chips in total under conditional licenses granted during the Nvidia CEO’s visit. More approvals are expected in the coming weeks. (Nvidia and the tech companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)
The purported chip sales are the culmination of a stunning American policy reversal over the past year. Under the Biden administration, the US sharply tightened export controls on high-end AI chips and barred models such as the H200 from being sold to Chinese customers due to national security concerns. The restrictions were meant to limit Beijing’s ability to develop powerful artificial intelligence systems with military or other sensitive applications.
But under President Trump, a different logic—promoted by Huang and White House AI and crypto czar…
