Huang has real reason to be feeling upbeat: His long-running lobbying campaign in Washington has, in effect, finally paid off. While Huang was gallivanting around China, multiple news outlets reported that Beijing had approved the sale of hundreds of thousands of powerful Nvidia H200 AI chips to Chinese companies. Under the Biden administration, the US sharply tightened export controls on high-end AI chips and barred models such as the H200 from being sold to Chinese customers due to national security concerns. But under President Trump, a different logic—promoted by Huang and White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks—has prevailed. By allowing domestic companies to buy H200 chips in limited quantities, Beijing has the opportunity to achieve two strategic goals at once, says Samuel Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.