Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Join the club
Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards.
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
Lisa Su meets China's vice premier during China visit — AMD CEO pledges deeper investment days after Trump-Xi summit
AMD CEO Lisa Su met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Monday, pledging to expand AMD's operations and investment in the country days after President Trump's state visit to China. He Lifeng invited multinational companies, including AMD, to deepen cooperation, citing the "balanced and positive" outcomes of the Xi Jinping-Trump summit held May 13th to 15th, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
Su wasn’t part of the executive delegation that accompanied Trump to Beijing, a group that included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was also initially left off the guest list before Trump personally called him and invited him to board Air Force One during a refueling stop in Anchorage. He Lifeng held a separate meeting with Huang as well.
Both AMD and Nvidia received export license approvals for their China-specific chips late last year, with AMD's MI308 and Nvidia's H20 each subject to a 15% revenue fee, but Nvidia has struggled to convert that clearance into actual sales. The company hasn’t completed a single H200 transaction with a Chinese buyer, hampered by both U.S. licensing bottlenecks and Beijing's decision not to allow purchases by domestic buyers.
Whether AMD's MI308 has fared better is unclear, but the company is thought to be actively moving forward with shipments. The more powerful MI325X, which delivers 1,300 TFLOPS of FP16 performance and pairs 256 GB of HBM3E with 6 TB/s of bandwidth, moved from a presumption of denial to case-by-case review under a Bureau of Industry and Security rule that took effect in January this year. That rule also covers Nvidia's H200 and carries a separate 25% tariff on chips that pass through the U.S. before export.
Following Su’s diplomatic outreach in Beijing, she delivered a keynote at AMD’s AI Developer Day in Shanghai. At the event, she predicted that roughly five billion people worldwide would use AI daily by 2030 and described China as a critical part of AMD's global footprint and “the world’s most dynamic AI ecosystem.” The company employs more than 4,000 engineers across R&D centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Taipei.
AMD is simultaneously scaling its commitments on the U.S. side of the chip divide. The company is building a gigawatt-scale data center for OpenAI, with the first phase scheduled for the second half of this year. Maintaining access to the Chinese market while deepening its role in American AI infrastructure requires AMD to deftly navigate the political waters of both sides of the Pacific, and Su's meeting is part of that ongoing corporate diplomacy.
Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
