ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he will speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping about Nvidia's state-of-the-art Blackwell artificial intelligence chip at their expected meeting on Thursday. Sales of the U.S. firm's high-end AI chips to China have been a key sticking point in protracted trade talks between the world's two largest economies this year. Beijing has long been irked by Washington's export controls that ban Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to China. The U.S. has justified these restrictions by alleging the Chinese military would use the chips to increase its capabilities. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Gyeongju, South Korea, Trump praised Nvidia's Blackwell as the "super-duper chip" and said he might speak to Xi about them, without elaborating. "I think we may be talking about that with President Xi," Trump said, adding he was "very optimistic" about his meeting with Xi, the first since he returned to the White House. Reuters in May reported that Nvidia was preparing a new chip for China that was a scaled-down variant of its most recent state-of-the-art AI Blackwell chips at a significantly lower cost. Nvidia CEO Jesen Huang said on Tuesday his company had not applied for U.S. export licenses to send its newest chips to China because of the Chinese position. "They've made it very clear that they don't want Nvidia to be there right now," he said at a news conference during the company's developers event, adding it needs access to the China market to fund U.S.-based research and development. "I hope that will change in the future because I think China is a very important market." U.S. administrations have swung back and forth on allowing Nvidia's advanced chips into China, vacillating on whether access would make China more dependent on the U.S. technology or give its military and tech companies a competitive boost. Beijing has put pressure on Chinese firms to buy and further develop domestic chips in response to U.S. export controls targeting the sale of Nvidia chips to China. Despite that pressure, Chinese developers still want Nvidia's chips due to constrained supplies of products from domestic rivals such as Huawei, Reuters has previously reported. (Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Writing by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Miyoung Kim and Stephen Coates)
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