The newly announced China-U.S. trade ceasefire appears, at first glance, to be a long-overdue cooling-off period. For now, China will delay its sweeping new export controls on rare earth elements, while the U.S. holds off on tariff increases, which will remain at 10%.
This will come as a much-welcome reprieve for hardware manufacturers, who rely on China’s near-total grip over rare-earth processing. But make no mistake: this is a temporary pause, and in no way the end of the matter. For Nvidia, which finds itself increasingly encircled by export curbs, market access limits, and geopolitical brinkmanship, the bigger story is Blackwell, which wasn't on the table during negotiations.
Rare earth reprieve, with strings attached
Washington is naturally framing the deal as a win, with Beijing now temporarily backtracking on rare earth restrictions. China's new licensing regime, originally set to kick in this quarter, would have added five additional elements to the control list, tightening the screws on high-end magnets and materials used in everything from HBM modules to EUV lithography.
U.S. negotiators claim that those rules have been paused for at least a year, which gives chipmakers and industrial suppliers a lifeline, especially as reshoring projects in the U.S. scramble to reach commercial scale.
But rare earths underpin the very machinery used to fabricate, etch, and package advanced silicon, and China dominates more than 90% of rare earth processing. So, while the truce ensures continuity for now, it does nothing for control. Chinese regulators can reinstate the paused rules whenever they choose, and we already know that AI chips are a major target.
Blackwell and AI silicon
Conspicuously absent from the agreement was any discussion of AI silicon. Ahead of the meeting between the two premiers, some observers speculated that the U.S. might carve out a path for limited high-end GPU exports. That didn’t happen. Instead, Trump told reporters flatly: “We’re not talking about the [sic] Blackwell.”
To say that this is something Nvidia doesn’t want to hear would be an understatement. Blackwell is a fundamental shift in how compute power is packaged and deployed. The GB200 integrates GPU and CPU silicon with an NVLink interconnect, and is the heart of Nvidia’s DGX SuperPODs. China can’t buy it. They can’t even buy the trimmed-down versions like the H200 under current restrictions.
Trump on China's Xi meeting: Did not discuss Nvidia's Blackwell chips - YouTube Watch On
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