Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emerges as Trump’s biggest ally in AI debate

As the debate over regulating artificial intelligence intensifies in Washington this week, President Donald Trump picked up the phone and called his biggest ally on the subject. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

“Robots are not going to take over the world,” Trump told Huang, who was scheduled to be the president’s speaker on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. President Trump reiterated his claims on social media that growing concerns about AI and data centers are a “hoax.”

While other technology leaders prefer meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos has been close to Trump during his second term in office, and experts told CNBC that Huang wields tremendous influence in the White House. He is scheduled to attend President Trump’s high-profile state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, said the people, who requested anonymity to protect confidentiality.

Nvidia has been driving the AI ​​boom even before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, supplying graphics processing units used by OpenAI, Anthropic, and others to train models and run large-scale workloads. Revenue soared from $17 billion in 2021 to $215 billion in the latest fiscal year.

Huang’s position as the leader of the world’s most valuable company and a chipmaker at the center of the AI ​​boom has given him the president’s ear on the most important topics in AI.

“Trump just likes winners, and Jensen is very good at speaking his own language,” Samuel Hammond, director of AI policy at the American Innovation Foundation think tank, said in an interview.

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment, and a representative for the White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Whether it’s attending a candlelight dinner with Trump at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida or ending his keynote speech by thanking guests for “making America great again,” Huang learned how to appeal to the president. President Trump and Mr. Hwang have appeared together in public at least six times since the start of his second term, including trips to Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom and a recent trip to China aboard Air Force One.

While Huang is pushing to make U.S. AI even faster, some of Nvidia’s most important customers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are increasing pressure on the government to regulate the technology amid growing concerns about its potential dangers.

Jacob Coxon, an anthropologist who previously worked at OpenAI, said he quit his job earlier this month because he was concerned that the top AI research institute was “putting our lives on the line.” Mr Coxon’s resignation sparked an uproar on social media, with more than 20 MPs calling for increased oversight.

Concerns were already swirling after OpenAI disclosed a major security incident in July. In that incident, two of the company’s models escaped containment, accessed the open internet, and hacked into the online AI repository Hugging Face in order to get better scores on benchmark tests.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited that episode in a shocking essay a week ago, urging AI developers to slow down the rate at which they improve their most advanced AI models. Amodei encouraged companies to work directly with the U.S. government and reiterated his desire for “thoughtful regulation of AI.”

Amodei’s “pacing” proposal was supported by other industry leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. space x CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chairman Demis Hassabis agreed on the need for slowdowns and additional oversight.

Mr. Huang took a different position.

In a public appearance last week, Nvidia’s CEO dismissed concerns about AI risks. He said predictions of doom are not based in science and model developers have a responsibility to ensure safety before releasing products.

Mr Huang said on Thursday the solution to safety concerns in Scotland was “good old-fashioned engineering”.

“There were incidents, but fortunately those incidents did not cause any harm,” Huang said.

Huang’s position is also shared publicly by venture capitalist David Sachs, who once served as President Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency czar. Sachs is a co-host of the “All In” podcast, which produced Monday’s event that featured the call between Trump and Hwang.

In a post on Truth Social on the same day as the summit, President Trump wrote, “The only control or ‘guardrail’ that AI needs is a strong and smart (high IQ!) President. America definitely has that!”

Before the recent safety uproar, NVIDIA had focused its lobbying in Washington on export controls.

Last year, Nvidia drew harsh criticism from U.S. lawmakers for promoting sales of AI chips to regulated countries, including China.

Some lawmakers, including Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, have warned that selling Nvidia hardware to China could threaten U.S. national security and narrow America’s lead in AI.

In December, Hwang’s strategy paid off. President Trump announced that Nvidia was given permission to ship H200 chips to Chinese customers, and the United States would collect a 25% fee in return.

The H200 announcement sparked intense backlash from both sides of the aisle. Mr. Huang declined Mr. Warren’s invitation to testify before the Senate Banking Committee in June. The following month, top U.S. trade officials confirmed that H200 sales to China were underway.

Nvidia and Huang argued that banning Nvidia exports to China is against U.S. interests, in part because such a move would spur the world’s second-largest economy and computing market to develop its own cutting-edge AI chips. Nvidia is shipping two generations of new Blackwell processors in the US, so the H200 is no longer Nvidia’s most powerful chip.

But Nvidia’s fate was not entirely in the hands of U.S. lawmakers, as Chinese regulators had largely blocked imports of the H200 chip.

Nvidia’s clear profit motive has led some experts to say it takes concerns expressed by model developers more seriously than those of chipmakers, since the lab is responsible for the actual AI technology.

“NVIDIA is the most aggressive in terms of just trying to make money,” said Andrew Yun, a researcher at CivAI, a nonprofit organization that warns of the dangers of AI. “At every turn, they work really hard to make sure that whatever happens is positive for NVIDIA’s bottom line.”

Nvidia’s China ambitions will loom large at Thursday’s state dinner with Trump, Huang and Xi in attendance. According to CNN, the White House is also planning a meeting with key AI executives to coincide with the event. Other industry executives, including Mr. Altman, are also expected to attend.

However, Mr. Hwang’s presence carries special weight. During a House hearing on Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked whether President Trump understands the threat posed by AI.

“All I can say is that the president is completely aligned with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang,” Bessent said.

WATCH: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says safety is an engineering issue