FT: Huang Never Reached Beijing's Chip Policymakers in 20 Years

Nvidia had been in China for more than two decades, but the policymakers driving Beijing's chip self-sufficiency push were never in the room with Jensen Huang. That is the finding in an FT report by Eleanor Olcott, which names Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang and the National Development and Reform Commission's semiconductor team, overseen by Vice Minister Xiangli Bin, as the officials setting the policy Huang spent years trying to work around.

The reporting cuts against the pitch Huang has long made in Washington: that keeping Chinese buyers on Nvidia hardware preserved American leverage. Under Xi Jinping, the FT writes, China is "going all out for tech self-sufficiency precisely to escape the kind of dependencies that Huang envisages." Xi, the piece adds, "has been cool on Huang's marketing pitch."

The timing underscores the gap. Although Trump greenlit sales of Nvidia's H200 chips to China, with the US government taking a cut of the revenues, Beijing is strictly limiting imports and continuing to back domestic suppliers such as Huawei and Cambricon.

If the people who actually write China's chip policy never engaged with Huang, the Nvidia leverage argument looks less like mutual dependence and more like a one-way bet. The story arrives inside a wider run on our chips tracker, including Semafor's reporting that Nvidia counsel Tim Teter invoked Trump's name on export licenses.