“It may sound ironic, but the fall of Jensen helps to strengthen Huawei’s leading position in China,” George Chen, a partner at the Asia Group, told the Financial Times reported.
For two decades, the Financial Times said that despite dedicating considerable time to pursuing the Chinese market, Jensen Huang found it difficult to connect with the specific officials holding the authority over Nvidia’s destiny in the region.
Huang visited China six times in three years, securing his first recorded meeting with a top leader in April 2025 with Vice-He Lifeng. He met He again in July 2025 alongside commerce minister Wang Wentao, with those talks running through Ren Hongbin.
However, Nvidia never secured talks with the National Development and Reform Commission, which led Beijing’s push to restrict Nvidia chips. Huang also failed to win more time with Wang once those curbs arrived.
Part of the problem was Nvidia’s thin lobbying infrastructure. The company had no dedicated team for Chinese officials until late 2025, when it hired Tony Jiang from Intel. In May, Huang joined President Donald Trump’s business delegation to China, briefly speaking with Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang in public.
Beijing was split over the hardware. The commerce ministry saw Nvidia chips as a bridge while Huawei caught up, while security officials viewed reliance on Nvidia as a weakness, a view that gained ground over the past year.
Eleanor Olcott reported for the FT that Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang and the National Development and Reform Commission’s semiconductor team, overseen by Vice Minister Xiangli Bin, set the policy Huang spent years trying to work around.
Those findings contradict Huang's argument in Washington: that keeping Chinese buyers on Nvidia hardware maintained American influence. Under Xi Jinping, China is “going all out for tech self-sufficiency precisely to escape the kind of dependencies that Huang envisages.” Xi has been cool on Huang’s marketing pitch.
Huang resigned as Nvidia’s chief executive on Thursday after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, a former Megaspeed executive whom US officials suspect of spying for China. Beijing denied she is a spy, and the two are not related.
Even though Trump approved the commerce of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China under an arrangement where the US government receives a portion of the earnings, import restrictions remain tightly enforced by Beijing, which maintains its strong support for local alternatives like Cambricon and Huawei.
Nvidia, the commerce ministry, and China’s cyberspace regulator did not respond to the FT. Nvidia’s board inquiry continues, and the company reports its third-quarter results on 17 November.
