By Stephen Nellis and Alexandra Alper
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is set to give a keynote address in the U.S. capital on Tuesday, with investors looking for clarity on what chips the artificial
intelligence leader will be able to sell to the vast Chinese market.
Huang's remarks are expected at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT). President Donald Trump is touring Asia this week and is expected to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. The flow of advanced technology between the two nations is likely to be at the center of trade discussions, with access to Nvidia's chips deemed a key issue.
Huang will speak at Nvidia's GTC event, held for the first time in Washington, D.C., a sign that Nvidia is pursuing work with the government and contractors clustered around the capital. At its last GTC event in California in March, Nvidia laid out its chip road map for the next year.
Both the first Trump administration and President Joe Biden clamped down on sales of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China, but the second Trump administration has shown an openness to letting Nvidia ship chips there. Huang has argued that Nvidia needs access to some $50 billion in potential sales from the Chinese market to fund U.S.-based research and development to maintain his company's edge. Reuters has previously reported that Chinese developers still want Nvidia's chips, despite pressure from Beijing to purchase domestic chips from Huawei Technologies Co.
Nvidia announced a partnership with Intel last month, which analysts have said should help it push into markets where Intel's central processing units (CPUs) remain dominant.
"On the heels of its investment in (Intel), we expect an emerging theme to be the acceleration of the data processing market - the bulk of which is being done today on CPUs," UBS analyst Tim Arcuri wrote in a note to investors. "We expect this to become an increasingly important theme with (Nvidia)."
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
