Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is surprisingly not among the business leaders invited to join President Donald Trump as he visits China from May 13 to 15, 2026. One source familiar with the matter confirmed this with Bloomberg, saying that the leather-clad chief of the most valuable company in the world isn’t on the guest list, which includes Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. These executives represent significant business interests in China, but, for one reason or another, the White House passed over Huang this time.

Jensen is a fixture around Washington, and he’s been included in several of Trump’s state visits. He was part of the presidential entourage in the Middle East and the UK, and he was even praised by the president in London last year, where Trump said, “You’re taking over the world, Jensen.” So, his exclusion from the president’s China state visit is quite a surprise to many, especially as Trump approved Nvidia H200 exports to China in late 2025.

This ban caused Nvidia’s China market share to plummet from a high of 95% to essentially zero, allowing homegrown chipmakers like Huawei, Cambricon, Alibaba, and Baidu to gain ground as they fill the vacuum left behind by the American chipmaker. Even though Trump eventually allowed Chinese companies to purchase H200 chips once again (provided Nvidia secures a license to sell them to a firm), Beijing stepped in and told its customs officers to stop the chips at the border. It has been almost six months since the White House gave Nvidia the go-signal to sell the H200, but U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the company has yet to sell a single H200 AI GPU to China.

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