In April, Jensen Huang, the CEO of chip maker Nvidia, received a blunt welcome to the world of geopolitics when the Trump administration shut down sales of an artificial intelligence chip the company had designed specifically for China.
Since then, Huang has turned himself into a globe-trotting negotiator as he has tried to persuade President Donald Trump to reverse course. He has travelled with Trump, testified before Congress and charmed reporters in Washington. And he has courted allies in the White House who have quietly supported global business interests despite Trump’s tough talk on trade with China.
That work has started to pay off for Nvidia. Last week, Huang met Trump in the Oval Office and pressed his case for restarting sales of his specialised chips, said two people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He argued that American chips should be the global standard and that the US was making a grave mistake by ceding the giant Chinese market to home-grown rivals.
Within days, Nvidia said the administration was changing course. It was a remarkable reversal that punctuated Huang’s arrival as the tech industry’s leading geopolitical player. It also underscored Nvidia’s quick rise from little-known Silicon Valley chip maker to the most valuable public company in the world as well as the linchpin to the tech industry’s AI boom. Just last week, Nvidia, which controls more than 90 per cent of the market for chips needed to build AI systems, became the first public company worth more than $4 trillion. Since then, it has raced past that milestone, thanks largely to its return to China.
Huang, 62, was a reluctant lobbyist. An electrical engineer by training, he used to consider government affairs trivial, said two former employees. But he had to jump into Washington politics when the company’s AI chips became enmeshed in global politics.
Huang recently travelled to Beijing and held a news conference to tell customers that Nvidia was open for business.
Huang, now the world’s sixth-wealthiest man, amiably chatted with reporters about his relationship with Trump. The atmosphere was jubilant.
New York Times News Service
