BEIJING — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said it would be “a great honor” to travel to China with Donald Trump. But he isn’t among the executives joining the U.S. president to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping — a sign the chipmaker’s sales in one of its most important markets are unlikely to recover soon.

Huang has visited China multiple times in the last 18 months, including a high-profile trip last summer, underscoring Nvidia’s efforts to maintain ties in a market that once accounted for at least a fifth of its data center revenue.

But he is absent from Trump’s closely watched visit this week, when more than a dozen U.S. executives will join the president, including chip company Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Apple’s Tim Cook. Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg is also part of the delegation, as the U.S. planemaker is expected to secure its first major Chinese order in years.

Nvidia’s most advanced chips, widely used for training AI models, have faced tighter U.S. restrictions on China sales over the last four years. The company said in February that U.S.-government-approved versions of the chips had yet to be allowed into China.

The U.S. chipmaker’s China sales are unlikely to recover anytime soon, experts told CNBC.

There would be “very little” for Nvidia to gain in terms of deliverables if Huang joined Trump’s delegation, Hao Hong, chief investment officer at Lotus Asset Management, told CNBC’s Emily Tan on “The China Connection” on Tuesday.

“It’s highly unlikely that the more advanced form of Nvidia chips would be approved by the Trump administration for China to purchase,” Hong said, adding that technology “decoupling” between the U.S. and China is likely to increase.

“I think China realized that the tech rivalry between the two countries will be one of the key determinant factors going forward to determine the relative competitive position in the global geopolitics between the two countries,” Hong said.

Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.

Huang told CNBC’s Jim Cramer last week: “We should let the president announce whatever he decides to announce … If invited, it would be a privilege, ​it would be a great honor to represent the United States.”

Trump is scheduled to arrive in Beijing late on Wednesday local time for two days of meetings with Xi. It will be the first visit by a sitting U.S. president in nearly a decade.

The head of one of the nation’s largest auto finance lenders isn’t overly concerned about rising consumer automotive debt and inflated used car prices leading to longer loans on vehicle purchases.

His main reasoning? The percentage of income consumers are spending on their vehicles has remained relatively flat compared with 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic led to inflated pricing as demand surged but inventories stayed low.

“If I just told you, ‘Car prices going up, interest rates going up, insurance prices going up,’ you would say, ‘You know what, consumers must be paying more as a ratio to the income,'” Capital One Auto President Sanjiv Yajnik told CNBC. “However, if you look at every quintile of salary and earnings of people, the payment-to-income ratio has remained fairly flat.”

While Capital One reports median monthly car ownership payments have jumped from $390 to $525 since 2019, data provided exclusively to CNBC from its automotive unit suggest that vehicle costs have stayed relatively stable compared with income. That’s because, overall, the payment-to-income ratio has remained flat at approximately 10% since 2019, according to the automotive arm of the American bank.

Capital One Auto found 80% of car purchasers who finance a vehicle are below the generally recognized payment to income threshold of 15%.

“The consumer is being cautious. They’re being responsible. This is a much healthier way to do things than the alternative, because it’s not a discretionary spend,” said Yajnik, referring to consumers prioritizing vehicle payments for transportation, including work.

To get to that goal, however, more consumers are taking on longer loans to keep payments affordable.

The auto finance veteran’s view contrasts with others in the industry who view the longer term loans as a detriment to consumers’ pocketbooks.

They argue that so-called “forever loans” of six years or more have led to many buyers, particularly of new vehicles, being underwater on the equity of their cars and trucks. That means they owe more than their vehicle is worth when they decide to trade it in.

Edmunds reports roughly 26% of used vehicles purchased that involved a trade-in vehicle had negative equity this year through April. The amount of negative equity averaged $5,105, a 35% increase from 2019.

“As loan term lengths increase on average, the pace at which consumers make progress paying down their balance slows,” Jessica Caldwell, head of insights for CarMax‘s Edmunds, wrote in a recent online post. “If consumers then trade in their vehicle too soon for any reason, they are increasingly left holding more loan debt.”

Regarding financing for new vehicles during the first quarter, 90.2% of new vehicle loans involving trade-ins with negative equity carried terms of at least 72 months, and 43% extended to 84 months, according to Caldwell. The average negative equity trade-in was $7,183 during the quarter for new vehicles, according to Edmunds.

Those figures have been climbing since 2022, when inflated used vehicle values caused by a pandemic-fueled chip shortage insulated more shoppers from carrying debt into their next vehicle.

Consumers need to keep their vehicles for more time to make the long loans worth it, according to Yajnik. But that can also cause increases in maintenance costs as well as the likelihood that a vehicle needs repairs that exceed its value or has to be scrapped altogether.

“Yes, it takes longer to get your equity, but in the meantime, you get a use of the car, and you’re earning money,” said Yajnik, a 28-year veteran of Capital One who has led the automotive lending division since 2008.

The average listed price of a used vehicle was $25,390 in March, according to Cox’s most recent data. That compares to new vehicles, which depreciate faster, at $48,667.

Cox Automotive reports if all other things are equal on a loan, financing for a $30,000 vehicle at a 9% annual percentage rate would cost $3,100 more on an 84-month term than a 48-month loan. However, there’s a $264 difference in the monthly payments, which Yajnik said makes it more affordable for many consumers, especially those in lower income brackets.

“There’s obviously going to be pockets that have problems, but one has to start from a different place, which is, for which reason are people buying cars, and are they doing so irrationally?” Yajnik said.

Hollywood has lost one of its most lucrative theatrical markets. It’s unclear if it will ever win it back.

The Chinese box office was once a coveted space for American-made movies, so much so that studios produced films that would appeal directly to this international audience. But in the postpandemic cinema landscape, Hollywood hasn’t generated the strong ticket sales it once saw for its biggest blockbusters — and a waning relationship with Chinese cinemas is at least partly to blame.

The U.S.-China Film Agreement, struck in 2012 between the two governments, guaranteed 34 U.S. films would be released in China each year. That pact ended in 2017 and was never renewed or renegotiated. At the same time, China began expanding its local film production and instituting blackout dates to promote viewership of its homegrown titles. 

Add in strict censorship policies from the China Film Administration and recent political strains between the U.S. and China, and Hollywood films have faced several hurdles just to get distribution in the country post-Covid.

“I think that the kind of euphoria about the world’s largest market and thinking about China as a place that always creates a larger market for U.S. [intellectual property] is not accurate,” said Aynne Kokas, a professor at the University of Virginia and the author of “Hollywood Made in China.”

“[There are] constraints on the market in a couple of ways, first related to content control and not just content control in terms of censorship, but also in terms of control of distribution channels by the party,” Kokas said.

She said the film bureau will “turn on and off the levers of distribution based on the needs of the market.” If local Chinese films are doing well, the country will limit distribution access for foreign films. If there are gaps in film releases or releases aren’t selling as many tickets, it will open up the market.

In 2019, nine U.S. titles each generated more than $100 million at the Chinese box office, with Disney and Marvel Studio’s “Avengers: Endgame” collecting more than $600 million in the region, according to data from Comscore.

In the past five years combined, however, only 10 American films have generated more than $100 million in China, with only two topping $200 million.

The outlier is Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” which tallied a record-breaking $650 million in the country following its 2025 release.

Box office analysts tell CNBC that this feat is likely an anomaly and studios and Wall Street shouldn’t expect a sudden resurgence of ticket sales for American-made fare in the region even as major franchises launch ahead of the key summer movie season.

People in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are more optimistic about artificial intelligence than those in Western Europe and North America, according to a report by Anthropic that surveyed around 81,000 people in 159 countries.

The study, published Wednesday, revealed how economic gains from AI usage formed the main aspiration for most respondents, but analysts also warned that not everyone stands to benefit equally.

Anthropic researchers invited users of its Claude large language model to participate in conversations centered around questions about usage habits, hopes and fears over the development of AI.

These conversations, held using Anthropic Interviewer — a variant of Claude trained to conduct interviews — were subsequently also analyzed with Claude. First to filter out “spammy, unserious, or extremely minimal” responses, then for classifying and tagging responses by sentiment.

More specifically, these applications often include administrative tasks like “HR, billing, and other backoffice functions,” according to Seema Shah, vice president of insights from the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower in an email to CNBC.

The financial spoils of AI also seemed to favor an entrepreneurial class, as independent workers — which includes entrepreneurs, small business owners, and those with side gigs — experienced more than triple the rates of economic empowerment from AI usage over salaried employees, according to Anthropic.

But recent developments have also shown that ostensibly higher-order work may be vulnerable to many of the same disruptions.

After Anthropic launched Cowork in February — a Claude variant capable of handling more complex tasks like financial modeling and data management — stocks of companies ranging from software to research firms saw a broad selloff as investors were spooked by the implications of these launches.

As companies like Anthropic and Alibaba invest billions into agentic AI, developing models now able to perform actions autonomously with limited user supervision, it may become even harder to tell how professional lives are set to be disrupted.

“These agents are going to do increasingly sophisticated tasks on behalf of people, and that is going to have massive impacts,” said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research, in a phone call with CNBC.

Given the uncertainty with which future developments were expected to further transform human work, worries about job displacement surfaced as one of the main areas of concern in Anthropic’s study, with 22.3% of respondents expressing job concerns as their biggest sources of worry.

These displacement worries were “spread fairly evenly across job categories,” according to the report, which Anthropic undertook in December 2025.

“When I am coding now, I am mostly just an observer, not a creator anymore. I can see that even for the observer role, I might not be needed,” an unnamed software engineer from the U.S. was quoted by Anthropic as saying.

In a 2025 report, the United Nations Development Programme warned that future AI development could worsen existing socioeconomic inequalities, as economic benefits tended to get captured disproportionately by societies with greater capacity and access to digital infrastructure — which often means wealthier nations.

“In the absence of adequate conditions, [AI] may amplify existing vulnerabilities, namely through digital exclusion, algorithmic biases or dependence on external systems,” Raquel Neves told CNBC.

Although it may be too early to tell who stands to lose most in the AI race, there is little doubt over who the victors might be.

“Whoever successfully brings the [AI] agents that we’re all going to start using, is absolutely going to win,” Einstein said.

Anthropic has not responded to CNBC’s requests for comment.

— CNBC’s Dylan Butts contributed to this report.

Investors have poured money into emerging markets in recent years as the search for big stock gains has migrated overseas and as they look for diversification beyond the concentrated S&P 500. But the U.S.-Iran military conflict has reframed the concentration question, highlighting the level of risk in emerging markets when it comes to gains being dependent on a select number of stocks, many tied to the AI boom.

The iShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM) has had strong performance over the past few years and into 2026, up 29% in 2025 and still holding onto a small gain this year. However, its holdings remain largely tilted toward Asia, with large exposure to China, South Korea, India, and Taiwan, together representing over three-quarters of the index weight, and many of the top stocks tied to tech, including Taiwan Semiconductor and Samsung.

“If you look at the index within emerging markets, it’s still roughly 80% Asia,” Malcolm Dorson, senior emerging markets portfolio manager and senior v.p. head of the active investment team at ETF company Global X said on CNBC’s “ETF Edge” earlier this week. “That gives you a lot of concentration risk,” he said.

Overall, the EM index has a 30%-plus tech sector weighting.

South Korean stocks have experienced extreme volatility this week. The market posted its worst single-day move ever on Wednesday as the escalating war in the Middle East resulted in concerns about energy supplies to Asia, where top stocks in the memory sector fueling the AI boom rely on energy-intensive processes. After its worst day ever, the South Korean index rebounded on Thursday for its best day since 2008. The iShares MSCI South Korea ETF (EWY) is still down close to 13% this week.

Some of the enormous volatility in South Korean stocks is tied to how well they have performed recently, and how many retail investors have seen big gains from holding them. SK Hynix, a top holding in the broad emerging market indexes, gained 274% last year, while Samsung gained 125%.

A huge spike in oil prices since the outbreak of the military conflict has rattled global markets. On Friday, Brent crude futures topped $90 and U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were closing in on that range, up more than 30% this week, while Brent has advanced nearly 26%.

The energy squeeze in Asian nations can be seen in China’s reported decision this week to tell domestic oil refining companies to stop any exports of fuel, and more Asian nations may follow with similar moves to retain energy stockpiles, energy market experts have said.

It isn’t time to abandon emerging markets, according to ETF investing strategists, and some macroeconomic factors may sustain outperformance in these markets over the longer-term. But Dorson said a “barbell approach” to investment strategy may be wise, balancing exposure between different types of emerging markets rather than relying on one region. He says thinking this way should lead investors who want to maintain international exposure to look at Latin America as a balance against Asian markets.

“I think you need to have both,” Dorson said.

Countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia are heavily linked to energy and commodities market, and he said rising oil prices can provide an additional tailwind for those economies. “I’d say 25 to 33% of the story should be that attractiveness of getting exposure to commodities,” he said. He added that there are also political reform efforts in Latin American nations that could serve as additional tailwinds for economies. “All eyes are on political change that could drive fiscal reform,” he said, and he added that may benefit financial services sector stocks across the region.

Equities in several Latin America markets also trade at significant discounts to U.S. stocks, with many price-to-earnings ratios roughly half those in the S&P 500. For example, Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF, VOO, currently trades at a P/E ratio of 28, while its emerging markets ETF, VWO, trades at a P/E ratio of 18.

Disclaimer

A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox.

Market data firms have been pitching artificial intelligence as the key to locating elusive ultra-high-net-worth clients. But leaders at elite advisory firms told Inside Wealth they aren’t sold.

For starters, while AI products can surface data and contact information on ultra-high-net-worth individuals, that’s only half the battle.

“When we’re looking for clients with north of $100 million, I struggle to think they’re going to take a cold email and say, ‘Yes, here’s my balance sheet,'” said Matthew Fleissig, CEO and co-founder of Pathstone, a registered investor advisory with $182 billion in client assets.

Instead, he said referrals come when the company works on a more personal level, like when Pathstone once secured a private jet in under an hour for a client who needed to get from New Orleans to Albany, New York, before their mother died.

“Those types of things are how we are able to grow the business,” he said. “We create moments that matter.”

Fleissig said AI for client prospecting hasn’t been the gamechanger that startups purport it to be.

“These databases have been around forever, and now people have added an AI overlay to be able to mine the database,” he said. “Most of the time, it’s very similar strategies of aggregating data sources that are public or you can pay for, and trying to feed you lists of people. We, at this point, can do that ourselves.”

A growth executive at a high-end national RIA told Inside Wealth that he had done at least 20 demos of AI client prospecting tools in the past six months and said most are built on widely available large language models like Claude and GPT.

“You’re slapping a coat of paint on one of five major LLMs and selling through the fact that ‘Oh our info is better,'” said the executive, who requested anonymity to talk about client acquisition strategies. “Do I pay them $100,000 or do I talk to my IT team and figure out a way of doing it for cents on the dollar?”

Andrew Douglass, head of growth at AlTi Tiedemann Global, said there is little competitive advantage to using nonexclusive data. When the independent wealth management firm used to cold call clients from these types of databases, the client usually already had an advisor or had been called by dozens of other firms already, he said.

For the past five years, client referrals and personal networks have made up 40% and 30%, respectively, of AlTi’s organic growth, he said. Another 30% comes from networking with experts like trusts and estates lawyers and accountants who are likely to be working with clients going through a liquidity event, such as inheriting a fortune or selling a business.

“Most people go out and say, ‘Our minimums are $25 million so whoever has $25 million in liquid assets makes a great client.’ We don’t think that that is a strategy that ultimately works,” said Douglass, calling from the Heckerling estate planning conference in Orlando, Florida. “We think really being looked at in the market as a subject matter expert, consistently showing up to places like Heckerling and where the professional community is and being able to provide value, is the most effective way to grow the business,”

Word-of-mouth referrals are not inherently scalable and can be slow-going. Douglass said the sales cycle with an ultra-high-net-worth client can take 12 months, if not longer.

However, advisories focused on the ultra-rich like AlTi Global are looking for quality, not quantity, he said. The firm’s annual target for organic growth is 25 to 30 new clients in the U.S., which could add about $1.5 billion to $2 billion in new assets.

Eden Ovadia, CEO of AI client prospecting startup Finny, said she is used to encountering skepticism. Ovadia, who co-founded Finny in late 2023, said she views AI prospecting as a complement to traditional outreach rather than a replacement.

She said a popular way for high-end advisors to use Finny is to promote exclusive events to the right audience. For instance, an advisor looking to invite prospects to a suite at a Miami Heat game can use Finny to identify people who work in real estate and are interested in the team. Ovadia also said Finny can be used to identify clients who might need advice after a life transition, such as finding people who recently bought a property worth at least $5 million near Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

“There’s definitely a little bit of cynicism we have to get over when we talk to ultra-high-net-worth firms and they’re, ‘No, we don’t do AI. We want everything to feel really personalized, really white glove,'” she said. “I couldn’t agree more. The idea here is we actually can surface more data about your clients or your prospects than even you know.”

Finny can also be used to keep an eye on existing clients and monitor for signs they may be unhappy, such as searching for investment advice online, Ovadia said.

Fleissig said he is more excited about customers finding Pathstone through AI platforms like Gemini and ChatGPT. In the past two weeks, he said, Pathstone has received five inbound inquiries from clients worth at least $100 million from AI search engines.

Douglass said while AI hasn’t changed the way AlTi Global finds new business, he’s open-minded.

“If someone has a better mousetrap, we’re certainly excited about what the market’s going to look like and bring to bear,” he said.