Move over, Tim Cook. Jensen Huang is America Inc.'s new China envoy

Nvidia's boss is proving to be a canny diplomat.

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As a teenager in Oregon, Jensen Huang was one mean ping-pong player. In 1978, his mentor, Lou Bochenski, described him in a letter to Sports Illustrated magazine as "perhaps the most promising junior ever to play table tennis" in the American north-west.

Had he been a bit older, who knows, he might well have joined Bochenski's daughter, Judy, who toured China in 1971 as part of then US President Richard Nixon's "ping-pong diplomacy" initiative to improve relations between the capitalist and communist worlds.

What the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia missed out on then, he is making up for now, minus the table-tennis paddle. As America and China swap shots in the trade battle served up by US President Donald Trump, Mr Huang has pinged and ponged between Washington and Beijing to reassure both sides it is in their mutual interest to let his company keep selling some of its artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese buyers. In July, he talked to Mr Trump and then jetted to China for the third time in 2025.

On July 14, he notched up a big win. Nvidia said it would once again be permitted to sell its H20 AI processors in China. A de facto ban in April by the Trump administration on the sale of the chips, specially designed to comply with earlier export restrictions, may already have cost Nvidia around US$10 billion (S$12.8 billion) in forgone Chinese revenue. Its lifting may raise Nvidia's sales in 2025 by US$10 billion to US$15 billion, around a tenth of the previously forecast total, and its net profit by US$6 billion to US$9 billion. The day after the announcement, the firm's market value jumped by US$160 billion to nearly US$4.2 trillion. Its boss, who holds a 3.5 per cent stake, scored nearly US$6 billion.

Game, match, Huang?