Why US chip controls took a back seat at the Xi-Trump summit

There is little question that Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, the heads of US semiconductor chip giants Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), had secured two of the best seats in the house at the White House state dinner on Thursday evening: at the head table alongside the two presidents and their wives.

But what remains unclear is how much progress they were able to make on their primary goal of restoring access to the Chinese market, amid entrenched opposition to that happening in both China and the US.

That is because US semiconductor chip export controls do not seem to have been a major sticking point during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s historic state visit to Washington this week, despite most of the restrictions still being in place.

Early indications suggest that export controls were not a significant topic of debate during the talks, with no direct mention of them in the readouts so far from both Beijing and Washington summarising the achievements of the Xi–Trump summit.