BEIJING — The head of Nvidia downplayed his role in getting the U.S. government to lift a ban on selling an advanced computer chip in China and said it will take time to ramp up production once orders for the AI processor come in.

CEO Jensen Huang, speaking Wednesday in Beijing, was upbeat about the prospects for the H20 chip, which was designed to meet U.S. restrictions on technology exports to China but nonetheless blocked in April.

He met President Donald Trump before his trip and his company announced this week it had received assurances that sales to China would be approved.

“I don’t think I changed his mind,” Huang told a cluster of journalists.

The decision to lift the ban on the H20 chip was in the hands of U.S. and Chinese governments and whatever trade talks they had, he said.

“We can only influence them, inform them, do our best to provide them with facts,” Huang said.

Nvidia said in April that sales restrictions on its chip in China would cost the company $5.5 billion. The White House also blocked a chip from Advanced Micro Devices. Both companies say the Commerce Department is now moving forward with license applications to export them to China.

Huang said his company would likely be able to recover some of its losses but it’s unclear how much. That will depend on how many H20 orders are received and how quickly Nvidia can meet the demand.

“I think that H20 is going to be very successful here,” he said, noting the chip’s memory bandwidth makes it a good fit for the AI models being developed by Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Alibaba.

Huang also touted the release of a new RTX Pro graphics chip he said would power the development of humanoid robots. He described teams of robots working alongside people as the next wave in AI.

“Because there’s so much robotics innovation going on and so much smart factory work being done here and the supply chain is so vast, RTX Pro is perfect,” he said.