Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Joins Trump's Beijing Delegation as Last-Minute Addition — Chip Sales Breakthrough at Top of Agenda

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was added to President Trump's Beijing summit delegation on May 13 as a last-minute inclusion, according to Bloomberg, after Trump personally called Huang and picked him up in Alaska en route to China. Huang had not been on the original delegation list alongside Elon Musk (xAI/Tesla), Tim Cook (Apple), and Larry Fink (BlackRock). His addition dramatically escalated the semiconductor dimension of the summit: Nvidia faces a $4.5B inventory write-down on H20 chips restricted in April 2025, and Huang has been publicly lobbying the administration to allow H200 chip sales to China to prevent Huawei from dominating China's AI hardware market. The same day, a Fortune investigative report published May 13 revealed that encrypted channels are being used to smuggle Nvidia chips to China, Russia, and Iran — implicating Supermicro in supply chain diversion schemes — adding urgency to the question of whether export controls are functioning as intended or merely driving demand underground. Huang's presence at the summit signals the Trump administration is seriously considering a commercial breakthrough on chip access. From Beijing's perspective, Huang's inclusion is provocative: China's NDRC has been actively steering domestic firms away from Nvidia purchases and toward Huawei Ascend chips as a matter of industrial policy. ByteDance, which placed a $5.6B order for Huawei Ascend 950PR chips in April 2026, represents exactly the demand Beijing wants to capture domestically rather than cede to Nvidia. The stakes for Nvidia are acute — China historically represented 16.9% of Nvidia's revenue, and the combined inventory write-down plus H200 stall has cost Nvidia shareholders roughly $15B in market capitalization.