WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Nvidia ( NVDA ) CEO Jensen Huang kicked off a keynote address in the U.S. capital on Tuesday with investors eagerly looking for clarity on what chips the artificial intelligence leader will be able to sell to the vast Chinese market.

Huang took the stage in a packed conference hall as President Donald Trump continued his tour of Asia this week ahead of his expected meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday. The flow of advanced technology between the two nations is likely to be at the center of trade discussions, with access to Nvidia's ( NVDA ) chips a key issue.

Huang spoke at Nvidia's ( NVDA ) GTC event, held for the first time in Washington, D.C., a sign that Nvidia ( NVDA ) is pursuing work with the government and contractors clustered around the capital. At its last GTC event in California in March, Nvidia ( NVDA ) laid out its chip road map for the next year.

Former President Joe Biden clamped down on sales of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) most advanced chips to China, but Trump has wavered in his policy in his second term, at first restricting exports of Nvidia's ( NVDA ) AI chips designed for the China market before reversing course in July. 

Huang has argued that Nvidia ( NVDA ) needs access to some $50 billion in potential sales from the Chinese market to fund U.S.-based research and development to maintain his company's edge. Reuters has previously reported that Chinese developers still want Nvidia's ( NVDA ) chips, despite pressure from Beijing to purchase domestic chips from Huawei Technologies Co.

Nvidia ( NVDA ) announced a partnership with Intel last month, which analysts have said should help it push into markets where Intel's central processing units remain dominant.

"On the heels of its investment in (Intel), we expect an emerging theme to be the acceleration of the data processing market - the bulk of which is being done today on CPUs," UBS analyst Tim Arcuri wrote in a note to investors. "We expect this to become an increasingly important theme with (Nvidia ( NVDA ))."