US President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping have agreed to put a pause on their tariff wars, for a period of one year. The pause was instated during the meeting between the two leaders at the South Korean city of Busan.
Among the topics discussed by Trump and Xi were China’s current stranglehold on its rare earth metals, to which the US President responded by threatening to slap the Asian powerhouse with a 100% tariff on imports from China. Another topic was regarding semiconductors.
According to the New York Times, Trump’s discussion around the subject hovered around the possibility of allowing NVIDIA to resume sales of its AI chips to China once more – the company’s CEO has often said that since the trade restrictions on his company’s chips, NVIDIA has gone from having a 95% market share to zero in China.
Mind you, NVIDIA has already been given the green light to resume sales of its H20 chips, which itself is a watered-down version of the full-fat H100, but even then, China itself has been enforcing a countrywide ban on the purchase of any such GPUs. That, in turn, has led to a thriving black market in the country, one that Gamers Nexus proved in their recent documentary.
On that note, neither President had discussed the possible availability of NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU, the company’s most advanced and powerful chip to date. There was also no discussion about the fate of TikTok in the US. To quickly recap, Trump had signed an executive order earlier in September, finalising the deal for TikTok’s US operations to be sold to a US company, but till today, there’s still no word as to who will be holding the keys to said operation.
(Source: NYT, Engadget)
