There’s no doubt that Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, the heads of US semiconductor chip giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, had two of the best seats in the house at the White House state dinner on Thursday night: at the head table alongside the two presidents and their wives.
But what remains unclear is how much progress they have been able to make towards their primary goal of regaining access to the Chinese market, amid entrenched opposition to what is happening in both China and the United States.
That’s because export controls on US semiconductor chips did not appear to be a major point of contention during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s official visit to Washington this week, although most restrictions remain in place.
Early indications are that export controls were not a significant topic of discussion during the talks, with no direct mention of them in the readouts so far from both Beijing and Washington summarizing the achievements of the Xi-Trump summit.
