White House extends 90-day China tariff truce, begins licensing NVIDIA chip exports
- The Trump White House is keeping its China tariff ceasefire alive and, at the same time, reopening a narrow lane for NVIDIA chip sales. - The concrete tell is the pairing: Commerce has started licensing NVIDIA’s China-bound H20 chips while trade officials push a new U.S.-China “Board of Trade.” - That matters because Washington looks less focused on remaking China’s economy and more on managing rivalry through selective deals.
Tariffs and chips are supposed to sit in different boxes. One is about punishing imports. The other is about denying strategic technology. But the White House is now handling both as bargaining tools in the same U.S.-China negotiation. That is the real story here. The latest moves — extending the tariff truce and starting to license some NVIDIA exports again — point to a relationship that is still adversarial, but more openly transactional. ### What exactly changed? The tariff piece is not brand new today, but it is the framework everything else is sitting on. In May 2025, Washington and Beijing agreed in Geneva to suspend 24 percentage points of the new U.S. tariff rate on Chinese goods for 90 days and keep a residual 10% tariff in place. Suspended tariffs would continue while talks went on. ### And the NVIDIA part? The sharper new signal is on chips. Commerce has started issuing licenses that let NVIDIA export its H20 AI chips to China again. That matters because the H20 was the China-tailored product NVIDIA built to stay inside earlier export-control lines, and even that route had been blocked — it is commercially meaningful. ### Why is the H20 such a big deal? Because it is the compromise chip. It is not NVIDIA’s most advanced global product, but it is still powerful enough to matter for Chinese cloud companies and AI developers. So when Washington licenses H20 sales, it is saying something very specific: the U.S. stance is not “chips are back.” It is “some chips, under supervision, are back.” ### What is the “Board of Trade”? Turns out the administration is also exploring a formal managed-trade mechanism with China. Reuters reporting from the March Paris talks described a proposed U.S.-China “Board of Trade” as a way to identify products where the two sides can expand commerce without a panel for selective commerce. ### Why are soybeans suddenly back in the middle? Because soybeans are the classic politically useful trade concession. Ahead of the Trump-Xi meeting, proposals under discussion included Chinese purchases of 25 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans per year for three years, along with possible buying of poultry, beef, energy, and Boeing aircraft. Trump has also publicly pushed that it is visible proof that China is buying American goods. ### So is
