Jensen Huang's Ten Days: Beijing to Taipei

Opening

Hello, dear reader. This is OZ Talking.

On May 15, Jensen Huang stepped off Air Force One alongside President Donald Trump. The location: Beijing. He was accompanying the first US-China summit in eight years and six months. Less than ten days later, on May 23, he arrived at Taipei Songshan Airport aboard his private jet — handing out bottles of Yakult to the reporters waiting for him.

One CEO visited the capitals of both sides of the US-China conflict within ten days. This wasn’t just a stop on his Computex itinerary. Here’s the bottom line upfront: Nvidia is now walking an unprecedented tightrope, managing three colliding markets simultaneously — the US (regulator), China (buyer), and Taiwan (producer) — and the cost of that balancing act is starting to show up in concrete numbers.

🌐 The Ten-Day Route: From Beijing to Taipei

Let’s first walk through what happened over the past ten days.

On May 13, the White House confirmed that Jensen Huang would accompany President Trump on his China trip. Huang joined Air Force One in Alaska and traveled with the president all the way to Beijing, where the summit with President Xi Jinping took place. The fact that a private-sector CEO rode along on a US president’s state visit is, in itself, a powerful political signal.

At this meeting, Trump delivered two important messages.

First, he formally reconfirmed the export of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China. The approval had been announced back in December, but actual shipments had stalled amid regulatory friction on both sides. At this year’s GTC 2026, Huang had said, “We’ve received purchase orders for H200 from Chinese customers and are resuming manufacturing.”

Second, there was a signal aimed at Taiwan. Reports emerged that President Xi had directly asked Trump how the United States would respond if China attacked Taiwan. Trump said he had discussed arms sales to Taiwan in detail, but that the decision would ultimately be his to make. According to Axios, one Trump adviser assessed that “this China trip signals a growing likelihood that Taiwan will be on the table within five years.”

Then, ten days later, on May 23, the first thing Huang said upon arriving in Taipei was this:

“Vera Rubin will be the largest product in the history of Taiwan’s supply chain.”

Taken separately, these two trips look like an ordinary diplomatic event and an ordinary tech event. But strung together into a single itinerary, they bring the structural dilemma Nvidia faces into sharp focus.