U.S. President Donald Trump plans to discuss Nvidia’s advanced AI chips with Chinese President Xi Jinping during their widely expected meeting on Thursday, he told a media scrum Wednesday. 

While taking questions regarding his high-stakes meeting with Xi, Trump signaled that Nvidia’s Blackwell AI processors could be discussed. 

“We’ll be speaking about Blackwell, it’s the super duper chip,” he said. Nvidia’s “super duper chip” appeared to refer to the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip — its most advanced AI chip.

More broadly, Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture represents its latest generation of AI chips, or ‘graphics processing units,’ used to train and run large language models.

Trump went on to laud Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, claiming that they are about a decade ahead of any other chip.

“That’s our country. We’re about 10 years ahead of anybody else in chips — in the highly sophisticated chips. I think we may be talking about that with President Xi.” 

The comments come as Nvidia faces an uncertain future in China, once a lucrative market for the AI darling.

While export controls have long prevented Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI products to China, Washington had rolled back restrictions on the chipmaker’s less advanced, made-for-China H20 chips in July. 

Trump later indicated that he might also allow a downgraded version of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips into China.

But in a surprise move, Beijing recently stepped in to prevent its companies from importing Nvidia’s chips amid national security concerns regarding the company’s technology. As a result, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said earlier this month that the company is currently “100% out of China” and has no market share there.

However, many analysts view the Chinese ban as likely temporary, saying Beijing could be using Nvidia’s access to its market as leverage in its trade negotiations with the Trump administration.

Despite Trump’s remarks about Nvidia’s “super duper chip,” it seems more likely that a less advanced version would be on the table.

In August, Reuters reported Nvidia was developing a new chip for China — dubbed the B30A — that would be more powerful than the H20 and built on the Blackwell architecture.

Such a chip would hypothetically help Nvidia fend off growing competition from domestic players like Huawei, as Beijing accelerates its efforts to develop a self-sufficient AI environment.

However, semiconductor experts said a resumption of H20 exports, or an additional pathway for the B30A, would also help China’s AI ecosystem more broadly and undermine Washington’s strategy to curb Chinese access to cutting-edge computing, which began ramping up in 2022.

A report released earlier this week from the Institute for Progress, a U.S. think tank, argued that allowing B30A exports to China would dramatically shrink America’s current AI compute advantage over China.

Huang, who has long lobbied against U.S. chip restrictions, will reportedly be in South Korea at the same time as Trump this week. The Nvidia CEO is expected to make announcements with local partners, which Huang said would hopefully be “delightful to the people of Korea and really delightful to President Trump.”

Investors can’t get enough of artificial intelligence, despite worries over the sector’s excessively high valuations.

The S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite rose Tuesday stateside, with all three notching new intraday highs. The major averages were juiced by gains in tech. Nvidia popped nearly 5%, while Microsoft climbed roughly 2%.

Both Apple and Microsoft reached a market capitalization of over $4 trillion after their shares rose. It was the first time Apple hit that milestone, though it closed just shy of that level.

Tech companies can’t get enough of each other, either.

Nvidia announced a $1 trillion investment in Nokia, which the Finnish company said will go toward developing its AI plans. For those, like me, who remember Nokia as a company that made the most desirable and bullet-proof phones: It primarily produces cellular equipment now.

Meanwhile, with its 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business, Microsoft is potentially sitting on a goldmine — provided AI finds its footing as a sustainable, revenue-generating business in the long run. OpenAI on Tuesday announced it had completed its restructuring as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit arm.

It’s not just Microsoft. Investors who have poured money into tech could potentially gain big — as Cathie Wood of Ark Invest says, “If our expectations for AI … are correct, we are at the very beginning of a technology revolution.”

The Fed has a rate cut plus a bunch of other things on its plate this week. Here’s what to expect

Markets are assigning a nearly 100% probability that the Federal Open Market Committee will approve a second consecutive quarter percentage point, or 25 basis point, reduction in the federal funds rate. The overnight lending benchmark is currently targeted between 4%-4.25%.

Beyond that, policymakers are likely to debate, among other things, the future path of reductions, the challenges posed by a lack of economic data and the timetable for ending the reduction in the Fed’s asset portfolio of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities.

— Jeff Cox

South Korea’s SK Hynix on Wednesday posted record quarterly revenue and profit, boosted by a strong demand for its high bandwidth memory used in generative AI chipsets.

Here are SK Hynix’s third-quarter results versus LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

• Revenue: 24.45 trillion won ($17.13 billion) vs. 24.73 trillion won
• Operating profit: 11.38 trillion won vs. 11.39 trillion won

Revenue rose about 39% in the September quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, while operating profit surged 62%, year on year.

On a quarter-on-quarter basis, revenue was up 10%, while operating profit grew 24%.

SK Hynix makes memory chips that are used to store data and can be found in everything from servers to consumer devices such as smartphones and laptops.

The company has benefited from a boom in artificial intelligence as a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory or HBM chips used to power AI data center servers. 

“As demand across the memory segment has soared due to customers’ expanding investments in AI infrastructure, SK Hynix once again surpassed the record-high performance of the previous quarter due to increased sales of high value-added products,” SK Hynix said in its earnings release. 

HBM falls into the broader category of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM — a type of semiconductor memory used to store data and program code that can be found in PCs, workstations and servers.

SK Hynix has set itself apart in the DRAM market by getting an early lead in HBM and establishing itself as the main supplier to the world’s leading AI chip designer, Nvidia. 

However, its main competitors, U.S.-based Micron and South Korean-based tech giant Samsung, have been working to catch up in the space.

“With the innovation of AI technology, the memory market has shifted to a new paradigm and demand has begun to spread to all product areas,” SK Hynix Chief Financial Officer Kim Woohyun said in the earnings release.

“We will continue to strengthen our AI memory leadership by responding to customer demand through market-leading products and differentiated technological capabilities,” he added.

The HBM market is expected to continue to boom over the next few years to around $43 billion by 2027, giving strong earnings leverage to memory manufacturers such as SK Hynix, MS Hwang, research director at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

“[F]or SK Hynix to continue generating profits, it’ll be important for the company to maintain and enhance its competitive edge,” he added.

A report from Counterpoint Research earlier this month showed that SK Hynix held a leading 38% share of the DRAM market by revenue in the second quarter of the year, increasing its shares after having overtaken Samsung in the first quarter. 

The report added that the global HBM  market grew 178% year over year in the second quarter, and SK Hynix dominated the space with a 64% share.