Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Lisa Su of AMD have joined the advisory board of Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing, alongside Marc Pictet, senior managing partner of Pictet Group, according to the school's own announcement reported by the South China Morning Post scmp.com. The seat puts the chiefs of the two dominant US AI-chip firms inside a forum that has connected global executives with senior Chinese officials since October 2000, at a moment when Nvidia is guiding investors as though its Chinese data-center compute business does not exist eu.36kr.comsec.gov.
The board is chaired by Apple chief executive Tim Cook and includes Tesla's Elon Musk, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon and BlackRock's Larry Fink, per The Next Web's account of a Financial Times report thenextweb.com. Its 27th annual meeting is scheduled for October 13–14, 2026, in Beijing, with five succeeding members — from BMW, Walmart, Coca-Cola, General Atlantic and BP — also seated kucoin.com.
Guidance that prices China at zero
Nvidia's quarterly outlooks have carried the same sentence for three consecutive quarters: "NVIDIA is not assuming any Data Center compute revenue from China in its outlook." The line appears in the Q4 fiscal 2026 release of February 25, 2026, the Q1 fiscal 2027 release of May 20, 2026, and the Q2 fiscal 2027 release of August 26, 2026 sec.govsec.govsec.gov. The most recent of those guided Q3 FY27 revenue to $108.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, on a quarter in which revenue was $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, and Data Center revenue was $89.0 billion sec.gov.
| Nvidia period | Revenue | Y/Y | China DC compute in outlook? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 FY26 (ended Jan 25, 2026) | $68.1B | +73% | No sec.gov |
| Q1 FY27 (ended Apr 26, 2026) | $81.6B | +85% | No sec.gov |
| Q2 FY27 (ended Jul 26, 2026) | $96.2B | +106% | No sec.gov |
The zero-China assumption has sat inside a US export-control regime that since 2022 has blocked Nvidia's most advanced GPUs from Chinese customers, with the Commerce Department tightening the perimeter several times; Nvidia's response has been China-specific lower-spec parts, the H20 and the upcoming B30A, priced aggressively thenextweb.com.
What the seat is and is not
The Next Web's assessment is blunt about the seat's modest formal weight: in board-of-directors terms it is "an unremarkable invitation accepted," and the board "does not, formally, give Tsinghua influence over its members' companies" — what it gives members is direct exposure to Beijing's economic-policy thinking thenextweb.com. Cook has chaired the body for several years thenextweb.com. 36Kr, reporting the Financial Times scoop, notes the news came from insiders and had not been officially announced at the time of its May 29 piece eu.36kr.com; the school's own social-media post, reported by SCMP on the appointments, and the meeting notice of September 29 have since put the names on the record scmp.comkucoin.com.
The Huawei argument, and the political cost
Huang's public case for engagement is that Chinese AI labs running on Huawei chips would be a "horrible outcome" for the United States, and 36Kr reported that in the same week as the Tsinghua news he admitted Nvidia has basically ceded the Chinese AI chip market to Huawei thenextweb.comeu.36kr.com. The 2026 Stanford AI Index put the gap between the best US and Chinese models at 2.7%, down from 17.5–31.6 percentage points in 2023, sharpening the argument that restricting Nvidia sales hands the market to a domestic rival thenextweb.com.
Washington's tolerance is the live variable. Republican China hawks in Congress have already grumbled publicly about Huang's Beijing footprint, and Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, ranking member of the House Select Committee on the CCP, in August 2025 condemned a reported arrangement under which Nvidia and AMD would pay 15% of China chip-sales revenue in exchange for export licenses, calling it "a dangerous misuse of export controls that undermines our national security" thenextweb.comdemocrats-selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov. GuruFocus reported that US authorities had cleared roughly 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia's H200 gurufocus.com.
Whether the seat draws congressional hearings or only commentary is, in The Next Web's phrasing, "the question the back half of 2026 will answer" thenextweb.com. The October 13–14 meeting in Beijing is the first date on which that answer starts forming kucoin.com.