BEIJING (Reuters) – Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Thursday that China was a very important market for Nvidia after the U.S. imposed a ban on sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chips to the country.

“We hope to continue to cooperate with China,” Huang said in a meeting with Ren Hongbin, head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, according to Chinese state broadcaster CCTV.

China welcomes more U.S. companies including Nvidia to further explore the Chinese market, vice premier He Lifeng told Huang as the two met at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Thursday, state news agency Xinhua reported.

China, with vast potential for investment and consumption, has always been “fertile ground” for investment and trade by foreign enterprises, He was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

Huang arrived in Beijing earlier in the day at the invitation of the trade organisation.

His visit comes at a time when the United States has put new restrictions on China-bound shipments of Nvidia’s H20 datacentre GPUs, the only compliant AI chip the company can sell legally to China.

“We regularly meet with government leaders to discuss our company’s products and technology,” a Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement, without further elaborating on Huang’s agenda while in China.

The U.S. ban has created uncertainty for Chinese internet companies, which were still anticipating H20 deliveries by the end of the year.

(Reporting by Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Kate Mayberry and Emelia Sithole-Matarise, Kirsten Donovan)