NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang during his GTC 2026 keynote at the SAP Center in San Jose, 16 March 2026
Jensen Huang spent years courting China, but he struggled to reach the officials who decided Nvidia’s fate there, the Financial Times reported . The paper cited people familiar with the matter.
Huang resigned as Nvidia’s chief executive on Thursday. He had admitted an affair with Alice Huang , a former Megaspeed executive whom US officials suspect of spying for China. Beijing denies she is a spy, and the two are not related.
The FT looks at what came before. Huang visited China six times in three years. His first recorded meeting with a top leader came in April 2025, with Vice-Premier He Lifeng. In July 2025 he met He again, and commerce minister Wang Wentao too.
Those meetings ran through Ren Hongbin, who heads China’s main trade promotion body, the FT said. But Nvidia never secured talks with the National Development and Reform Commission. The FT says the state planner 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, the FT said. It had no dedicated team for Chinese officials until late 2025, when it hired Tony Jiang from Intel.
Beijing was also split, according to the paper. The commerce ministry saw Nvidia chips as a bridge while Huawei caught up. Security officials saw reliance on Nvidia as a weakness, and their view has gained ground over the past year.
Huang often warned Washington that export curbs would only help Huawei. Now some say his exit will do the same.
“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 FT.
In May, Huang joined President Donald Trump’s business delegation to China. He briefly spoke with Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang, the most senior leaders he had met in public.
Nvidia, the commerce ministry and China’s cyberspace regulator did not respond to the FT. Nvidia’s board inquiry continues, and it reports third-quarter results on 17 November.
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