Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang travelled to Washington this summer seeking permission for the company to resume sales of its H20 artificial-intelligence chips to Chinese customers, the Wall Street Journal reported. Facing U.S. export curbs and a 145% tariff regime that threatened billions of dollars in annual revenue, Huang pledged that Nvidia would invest as much as US$500 billion in new manufacturing capacity and research facilities in the United States if the White House eased the restrictions. People familiar with the talks told the newspaper that President Donald Trump pressed Huang for still-larger commitments before agreeing to a compromise that allows limited exports of the lower-tier H20 processors. The decision, confirmed by administration officials last week, rolls back part of the Biden-era clamp-down on advanced semiconductor shipments to China but preserves a ban on Nvidia’s most powerful Blackwell-class chips. The arrangement gives Nvidia a path to protect a key market, yet early signals from Beijing suggest Chinese clients are reluctant to rely again on U.S. hardware as domestic suppliers and open-source models from DeepSeek and Alibaba gain traction. U.S. lawmakers and security analysts, meanwhile, questioned the deal’s strategic wisdom and pointed to Trump’s 2024 disclosure showing he personally owned between US$615,000 and US$1.3 million in Nvidia shares. Nvidia shares were little changed in pre-market trading on Friday after the report. The episode underscores the political leverage surrounding advanced chips as Washington and Beijing compete for leadership in artificial intelligence.