A single list gathers nearly half of the global tech industry, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su become "colleagues" in China?

In the last week of September 2026, the names of Jensen Huang and Lisa Su appeared on the same list simultaneously.

In the announcement of new members of the Advisory Board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, and Pierre P. Pictet from the Pictet Group of Switzerland officially joined the board.

This list of the Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board is a condensed map of global business power. The addition of Jensen Huang and Lisa Su only raises the "AI concentration" of this map by a few more points.

Why did they become "colleagues"?

To understand what it means for Jensen Huang and Lisa Su to "be colleagues in China", we first need to look at who they are about to work with.

The Advisory Board of Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management was established in October 2000, with the active promotion of the then dean and Premier Zhu Rongji of the State Council. This positioning determines that it has never been an ordinary academic consulting institution since its inception. 25 years on, it has evolved into a special entity: an informal dialogue channel between the world's top CEOs and the top decision-making level of China.

The current chairman is Tim Cook, Executive Chairman of the Board of Apple Inc. This fact alone is sufficient to illustrate the weight of this board.

The board currently has about 65 members, and the list reads like a "ranking of the world's most valuable companies". In the technology camp, Elon Musk from Tesla, Satya Nadella from Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg from Meta, and Michael Dell from Dell have long been on the list. The financial camp is equally heavyweight:

Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink from BlackRock, Ray Dalio from Bridgewater Associates. In the industrial sector, there are Roland Busch from Siemens, Ola Källenius from Mercedes-Benz, John Donahoe from Nike, Mary Barra from General Motors, and Natarajan Chandrasekaran from Tata Group.

The 2026 new member list further expands the board. In addition to Jensen Huang and Lisa Su, the succeeding members include Oliver Zipse, Chairman of the BMW Group, Doug McMillon, President and CEO of Walmart, James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola, Martin Escobari, Co-President of General Atlantic, and Meg O'Neill, CEO of bp Group.

All these people share one common feature: Almost all the companies they lead have substantial business in China, or are deeply participating in China's industrial transformation. Walmart's China supply chain, Coca-Cola's distribution network, BMW's joint venture factories, bp's energy layout - none of them are "purely academic" roles.

Jensen Huang and Lisa Su have just entered exactly such a circle.

Three layers of signals from one list

Putting the accession of Jensen Huang and Lisa Su in the current time context, it releases at least three layers of signals.

First of all, the situation of NVIDIA and AMD in the Chinese market is far more than can be described by the word "subtle". Since 2022, the United States has banned the export of NVIDIA's most advanced AI chips to China, and until after Trump's visit to China, there has still been no breakthrough in the sales of H200 chips to China. AMD is also facing similar export control restrictions.

Against this backdrop, the CEOs of the two companies accepting the invitation to the Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board at the same time is essentially maintaining their presence in China within a "non-transactional" framework. The Advisory Board does not involve specific commercial negotiations, but it provides a fixed channel for annual meetings in Beijing. For the chip industry, the value of this "institutionalized presence" may be more enduring than any separate meeting.

The second layer of meaning is that Jensen Huang and Lisa Su also share another identity: both are members of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology of the United States. Lisa Su also serves as the Chair of the Board of the Semiconductor Industry Association.

What does this mean? It means that these two people have a say in two sets of technology governance systems at the same time. They have seats at the AI policy discussion table in Washington, and also in the Tsinghua Advisory Board in Beijing. At a time when the Sino-US tech game is getting increasingly complex, this "dual-hat identity" itself constitutes a scarce resource. Some people will say that the advisory board member is nothing more than an honorary title. But when the holders of this honorary title are the controllers of the lifeline of global AI computing power, the boundary between "virtual" and "real" becomes blurred.

It is worth noting that the "industrial focus" of the Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board is tilting towards hard technology. A closer look at the 2026 new member list: Jensen Huang, Lisa Su, Pierre P. Pictet, plus the succeeding members from BMW, Walmart, Coca-Cola, and bp. The proportion of technology and real industry representatives has risen significantly, while the proportion of people with pure financial backgrounds has declined relatively.

This is no coincidence. The traditional strength of the Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board lies in finance and consulting, with figures from JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, Bridgewater, and McKinsey occupying important positions for years. But when AI becomes the core variable of global competition, and chips become a more sensitive strategic material than oil, the "member structure" of the board will inevitably adjust accordingly. The accession of Jensen Huang and Lisa Su is part of this adjustment process, not an isolated event.

A Delicate Position

One detail is worth noting. Jensen Huang and Lisa Su are distant relatives. Jensen Huang's mother, Luo Caixiu, and Lisa Su's maternal grandfather, Luo Bomu, both belong to the second generation of the Luo family in Tainan. Jensen Huang is 6 years older than Lisa Su, so in terms of seniority, Lisa Su should call him "cousin uncle". Both of them are big tech figures in Silicon Valley, relatives, friends, and rivals, and now they have an additional relationship: colleagues on the Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board.

The special feature of this "colleague" relationship is that its "job content" is not clear. The Advisory Board does not vote, make decisions, or publish research reports. Its core function is the annual meeting - every autumn, these people fly to Beijing, hold two days of meetings, meet some people, and say a few words.

But for NVIDIA and AMD, this "ambiguity" is exactly where the value lies. At a time when the official channels for Sino-US tech exchanges are narrowing, a board founded by Premier Zhu Rongji, chaired by Tim Cook, and with Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg as members, provides an unofficial but high-standard contact surface. The appearance of Jensen Huang and Lisa Su on this list means that NVIDIA and AMD have a "normalized" seat in China's highest-level business dialogues.

In the chess game of the Sino-US chip game, being present itself is an asset.

Over the 25 years since the establishment of the Tsinghua SEM Advisory Board in 2000, the changes in the member list itself are a miniature history of global business. In 2000, the list was mostly headed by leaders of traditional multinational corporations; in the 2010s, tech giants began to occupy core positions; after the 2020s, the weight of figures in the AI and chip sectors has continued to rise.

The addition of Jensen Huang and Lisa Su is the latest node of this evolution curve. They represent not only NVIDIA and AMD, but also a brand new form of communication: people who control AI computing power infrastructure are becoming one of the most irreplaceable roles in the global business order.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Financial Gossip Girl Channel" (ID: baguanvpindao), the author is Jian Shan, and it is published with authorization from 36Kr.