May 15 (Reuters) – U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg TV in an interview 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 said, adding that “15 to 17” U.S. CEOs present at Thursday’s meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke about their companies’ issues.
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.
Greer added that allowing the H200 imports would be a “sovereign decision” for China.
“They’re fluid, right? They change over time. It depends on what threats you see, what’s commercially available worldwide, what the Chinese can already do,” said Greer.
“And so you want to make sure you strike a balance between national security, protecting high tech, but also making sure that we’re benefiting from overseas markets. And so those are the kinds of things that went into the H200 decision as to whether the Chinese are going to buy or not.”
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’re making their own determinations. They’re very committed to domestic production,” said Greer.
“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.”
(Reporting by Laurie Chen, David Lawder, Liz Lee and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Kate Mayberry)
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