Copyright SiliconANGLE News
China will reportedly ease its restrictions on the export of certain rare earth elements following a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. The summit, which took place today in South Korea, also covered other areas. U.S. officials told reporters that Trump discussed TikTok and the sale of Nvidia Corp.’s graphics cards in China. Additionally, the White House has agreed to lower some duties on Chinese imports. It’s estimated that China processes about 90% of the world’s rare earth elements (pictured,) a group of 17 materials used to make networking equipment, medical devices and a long list of other systems. Earlier this year, the country imposed export restrictions on five rare earth materials: holmium, thulium, europium, ytterbium and erbium. Following the meeting between Trump and Xi, China will suspend those restrictions for one year. For the tech industry, the removal of erbium from the list may be the most significant development. Erbium is used to make optical signal amplifiers, which are essential components of subsea internet cables and other fiber-optic network links. Light beams weaken as they travel through glass. Amplifiers strengthen the light beams that travel through a fiber-optic cable, which avoids data loss. Nvidia’s graphics processing units were also a topic of the summit. Trump told reporters that the possibility of selling Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, its most advanced data center GPUs, to China wasn’t discussed. He didn’t elaborate further. In June, the White House gave Nvidia permission to export its scaled-down H20 GPUs to China. Analysts estimated at the time that the move could unlock billions of dollars in revenue for the chipmaker. In September, China reportedly told local companies not to use Nvidia’s H20 chips. The proposed sale of TikTok was also a focus of today’s summit. Last month, Trump signed an executive order that authorized an investor consortium to buy a majority stake in the app from ByteDance Ltd., its Chinese parent company. The deal would value TikTok at $14 billion. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated today that the transaction will be finalized in the “coming weeks and months.” The Trump-Xi meeting also covered other topics. The U.S. has agreed to lower tariffs on Chinese imports from 57% to 47% for one year. In the same time frame, the U.S. Commerce Department will avoid putting majority-owned subsidiaries of Chinese companies on its Entity List, which restricts organizations’ access to U.S. technology. China, in turn, has agreed to import 25 million tons of soy beans annually for the next three years.
