Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, is preparing to travel to China in late January, a routine Lunar New Year visit that this year coincides with the company's renewed effort to regain access to this market, reports Bloomberg. But while the U.S. government now allows the export of some of AMD's and Nvidia's AI GPUs to China, it remains to be seen how many of these processors the country is going to consume, given its effort for self-sufficiency.
Huang plans to attend internal company events tied to the Lunar New Year and is also expected to travel to Beijing, although it remains uncertain whether meetings with senior Chinese officials will occur, the report says, citing people familiar with the matter. The itinerary is not finalized and could still change. Nvidia reportedly declined to comment on the visit, which is in line with the company's current policy of not giving investors any hope on its return to the Chinese market of AI accelerators.
Huang has made similar trips at this time of year before, as the company maintains significant operations in China. However, this is the first time that the head of Nvidia will be visiting China now that the company is guaranteed to get an export license to ship its H200 GPUs to the People's Republic. The Chinese government seems to have put curbs on such shipments; as a result, it is expected that Huang will meet Chinese authorities to negotiate about imports of H200 to the country.
The Chinese government is expected to authorize imports as soon as this quarter for selected use cases by commercial companies like Alibaba or Baidu, which have a significant portion of their workloads relying on Nvidia's CUDA software stack. At the same time, China plans to prohibit the H200 from being deployed by the military, sensitive government agencies, critical infrastructure operators, and state-owned enterprises.
As a result, Huang's trip to China becomes more than just a visit to his employees and partners in the country, but potentially a way to negotiate shipments worth billions of dollars. Whether or not the head of Nvidia can actually persuade China's government to let more H200 AI accelerators in the country is something that remains to be seen, but this is certainly what business media expects him to do.
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