Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang will join US President Donald Trump on his visit to China as a last-minute addition to the trip, boarding Air Force One on a stopover in Alaska.
Nvidia’s shares extended gains to 1.3% in overnight trading.
Trump is being accompanied to China by several high-profile US business leaders including Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk, who also joined the president aboard his plane. But that list until Tuesday had not included Huang.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung said Huang’s schedule changed, and “it just happened to work out.”
Trump called Huang this morning and asked him to come on the trip, and the Nvidia leader flew to Anchorage to meet Air Force One on its planned layover, according to a person familiar with the matter.
“Jensen is attending the summit at the invitation of President Trump to support America and the administration’s goals,” Nvidia said in a statement.
There had been significant press converge of the decision to leave Jensen out of the delegation, with some suggestion that Nvidia was being excluded because of the domestic political controversy over Trump weighing whether to allow Beijing to purchase some of the company’s more advanced artificial intelligence chips. Last year, Huang emerged as a fixture in Washington with frequent visits to the White House and Capitol Hill to make his case for clearing a path for AI development, including by relaxing US export controls.
Nvidia scored a major lobbying win in December when Trump agreed to allow shipments of the company’s H200 AI chips to China, a decision that marked a significant easing of US restrictions aimed at keeping Beijing and its military from accessing the US’s most powerful technologies. Nvidia that month also succeeded in killing a chip-export provision in must-pass defense legislation.
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