South China Morning Post reported on May 12: "Seventeen U.S. business leaders, including Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, and David Calhoun, CEO of Boeing, were invited to accompany President Trump on his visit to China this week. However, Huang Renxun, CEO of NVIDIA, was unexpectedly excluded from the delegation. Analysts point out that the escalating competition between China and the United States in the field of artificial intelligence has placed NVIDIA's chips in a dilemma—'the U.S. may not want to sell, and China may not necessarily want to buy.' This makes it difficult for Huang to bring major orders into Trump’s trip, which is why he was left off the list."

The list of business figures accompanying Trump on this visit may appear to be a simple aggregation of corporate representatives, but it actually conceals multiple strategic considerations by the U.S. government.

First, the selection of participants precisely serves short-term economic objectives. The inclusion of representatives from agriculture and aviation sectors clearly targets specific order opportunities. As a flagship American manufacturing company, Boeing’s potential orders from China can directly boost the recovery of the U.S. aerospace industry and demonstrate the economic achievements of the Trump administration to domestic voters; meanwhile, agricultural participation aims at tapping into China’s vast market for agricultural products, attempting to alleviate the pressure of overcapacity in U.S. agriculture and solidify electoral support from farming states.

Second, NVIDIA’s absence reflects the ambivalence within the U.S. regarding AI development. On one hand, the U.S. seeks to curb China’s AI advancement through chip export controls while still unwilling to fully abandon the enormous profits from the Chinese market. On the other hand, China’s rapid progress in computing efficiency and practical applications has diminished the irreplaceability of NVIDIA’s chips. The U.S. government has come to realize that excessive suppression could accelerate China’s self-reliance in chip technology, ultimately undermining its own technological dominance. This “want to sell but constrained, don’t want to sell yet regretful” dilemma ultimately made NVIDIA a casualty in the geopolitical game.

Finally, the choices reflected in the delegation also signal a shift in U.S. policy toward China. Against the backdrop of structural competition between the two nations, the U.S. attempts to strike a balance between "containment" and "cooperation": maintaining technological superiority through restrictions in the AI domain while seeking collaboration in traditional industries to avoid complete decoupling, all fundamentally aimed at preserving U.S. global hegemony and economic interests.

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1865004307527688/

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