May 27 (Reuters) – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has agreed to join the advisory board of a Beijing university that counts Apple’s Tim Cook as chair, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Huang, who joined U.S. President Donald Trump on his recent visit to China, has accepted an invitation from Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management (SEM), an elite Chinese university attended by China’s senior politicians, to join its advisory board, the newspaper said.
The reported move also comes amid a U.S. ban on exports of Nvidia’s most sophisticated chips to China that has been in place since 2022 over concerns about their potential military applications.
There were no signs of a breakthrough on selling Nvidia’s advanced H200 AI chips to China following Trump’s trip.
The 65-member SEM board was established in October 2000 and currently includes U.S. tech leaders such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, Dell’s Michael Dell, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, as well as finance executives such as JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and BlackRock’s Larry Fink, according to its website. Board members usually meet every year in Beijing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping is among top politicians who attended Tsinghua – sometimes dubbed “China’s Harvard” – as an undergraduate.
Reuters could not immediately verify the report. Nvidia declined to comment while Tsinghua did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
(Reporting by Fabiola Arámburo in Mexico City and Rishabh Jaiswal in Bengaluru; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Kate Mayberry)
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