How Trump and the Nvidia CEO became partners on the international stage

SAN FRANCISCO — At a summit in South Korea last month, President Donald Trump interrupted a speech he was giving about how he was doing more than any other president to build data centers and employ American workers and asked about a new friend.

“Jensen, who is a great guy, he could be here,” Trump said of Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia. “I don’t even know. Is Jensen here? I think he’s nearby. Someone said he’s here. How is he? Good, huh?”

Speaking at a conference in Washington just hours after Trump, Huang also had glowing words for the president, praising the White House for dismantling regulations and encouraging investment in artificial intelligence. Trump “completely changed the game” for artificial intelligence, Huang said. He then boarded a flight to try to join Trump in South Korea.

These mutual words of admiration reflect what has become perhaps the most important relationship between the Trump administration and the business world, an unlikely partnership between a Silicon Valley engineer turned tycoon and a New York real estate mogul turned president.

Nvidia, which makes powerful chips essential to AI projects, was one of the first American technology companies to fulfill promises made to Trump to bring some manufacturing to the United States. And Trump, who closely follows stock market performance, is aware that Nvidia has become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.

The company’s chips also gave the president powerful negotiating leverage with several countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and China. They even played a role, never before reported, in the administration’s peace mediations between several nations.

Just as the United States offered nuclear technology in the 1950s to countries that agreed to use it peacefully, the Trump administration has discussed selling AI technology to countries ending conflicts, including Armenia and Azerbaijan, said two people familiar with the administration’s actions, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the emerging strategy.

In August, after the administration helped broker a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, met with officials from the countries to discuss AI and future technology exchanges.

Mkhitar Hayrapetyan, Armenia’s minister of high-tech industry, said cooperation on technologies began years ago, but that Trump and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan have taken the partnership to “a new level of development.” He added: “This is an important part of our long-term modernization efforts, along with the US-Armenia partnership framework.”

Last week, Kazakhstan joined the Abraham Accords, a historic agreement made during the first Trump administration to normalize relations between Israel and several Muslim-majority countries. The country also announced a US$2 billion deal to develop AI data centers with Nvidia chips.

A US official said Nvidia chips played a minor role in the negotiations. But its inclusion in the discussions shows how AI and Nvidia have become a tool for American diplomats and for a president trying to compile peace agreements while competing for the Nobel Prize.

Representatives for Azerbaijan did not immediately comment. Those in Kazakhstan did not respond to requests for comment.

White House spokesman Kush Desai acknowledged Trump’s relationship with Huang but said “no single relationship defines Trump’s second presidency.”

“President Trump has close personal relationships with numerous business leaders across diverse sectors — relationships that are bringing benefits to the American people as the administration works with companies to secure historic agreements,” he said.

John Rizzo, a spokesman for Nvidia, said the company supports Trump’s efforts to manufacture more semiconductors in the US. He added: “Nvidia has always worked to help the government understand our technology, but we do not determine US export policy.”

Huang had good reason to cultivate a relationship with Trump. The president holds the keys to Nvidia’s international and domestic regulation. It controls the licenses that allow Nvidia to sell to key markets like China, and it can help the company’s customers gain access to the electricity needed to power Nvidia’s chips.

White House policies have helped Nvidia accelerate its business. Wall Street expects the company, which will release financial results on Wednesday, to report a quarterly profit exceeding $30 billion for the first time, surpassing the earnings of technology giants such as Amazon and Apple.

Still, when Trump returned to the White House, his relationship with Huang was far from guaranteed. Huang has never spent much time in Washington and was one of the few prominent technology executives to skip Trump’s inauguration in January.

About two weeks after the inauguration, Huang and the president struggled to connect when they met for the first time in the Oval Office, said three people briefed on the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity. A second meeting at Mar-a-Lago also went poorly, with Huang failing to dissuade the president from banning some sales of Nvidia chips to China.

But in the spring, their relationship began to blossom, after Huang promised to invest heavily in U.S. factories.

In late April, Huang announced at a White House briefing that Nvidia and its suppliers would invest $500 billion in US manufacturing. Days later, he accompanied the president on his first international trip and helped facilitate more than $200 billion in chip sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Trump, who called the deal a victory, began calling Huang “my friend.”

“What a job you did,” Trump said during a speech in Saudi Arabia. “We are proud to have him in our country.”

The Middle East deals have provided a model for using AI chips as a foreign policy tool, the two people familiar with the administration’s strategy said. For years, the administration has strengthened diplomatic ties with countries by selling American products like Boeing planes. But the Trump administration has started to include AI chips and partnerships.

What also endeared Huang to Trump was Nvidia’s willingness to go along with the president’s interventionist approach toward big business, some of these people said. In August, Trump suggested that the US government take a cut of chip sales to China, and Huang agreed. While the idea appears to violate US law, Huang said at the Washington conference that the Trump administration was working on new regulations to allow it.

As he cozied up to Trump, Huang worried officials in Washington, including some of the president’s closest advisers, by downplaying the national security risk of supplying cutting-edge chips to China. He argued that the alternative — Chinese companies building something just as good — would be much worse.

In late October, Huang returned to the Oval Office and presented Trump with a shiny reflective silicon wafer — an early example of Nvidia’s new AI chip made in Arizona. It was a stark contrast to Trump’s experience with Apple, which promised for years to invest in the US but never produced a flagship product in the country.

The gift came as Huang tried to convince the president to allow Nvidia to sell a version of its most advanced chip, known as Blackwell, to China. The company also wanted Trump to help remove other barriers to its business there.

A few days later, as the president flew to South Korea to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump caused controversy by mentioning the sale of advanced chips to China. “Let’s talk about Blackwell,” he told the press on October 29.

The statement drew swift criticism from lawmakers and Trump’s own advisers. Cabinet officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, raised objections to the sales on national security grounds, two U.S. officials familiar with the discussions said. The resistance had already been reported by The Wall Street Journal.

On the flight back, Trump appeared to have changed his mind. He said he and Xi discussed chips, but “not Blackwell.” In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Trump stated that no one would have “the most advanced chips” “other than the United States.”

The incident showed the limits of Huang’s bond with the president. And it showed that national security concerns about China catching up to the US in the race to build AI may still, for now, outweigh the financial prospects of the companies that make the technology.

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