Nvidia's CEO Now Whispers in Trump's Ear — And China Wants Its Chips

Here's the short version: Nvidia sells the chips that power almost all modern AI. Under the previous administration, the US blocked Nvidia from selling its best chips to China, and Nvidia's share of China's advanced AI chip market dropped from about 95 percent to nearly zero. Now, China's tech ministry is asking Alibaba and ByteDance (the company behind TikTok) to hand over plans to buy millions more Nvidia chips over the next year. These are technically gaming chips, but China expects to stack them into servers to run its most popular AI models.

At the same time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has become one of the most influential voices in Washington. President Trump reportedly went from asking "What the hell is Nvidia?" to calling the company "amazing" after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago. He later lifted export controls (rules limiting which US tech can be sold abroad) on Nvidia's H200 chips. Trump and Huang now talk regularly by phone and appear together in public. Notably, Trump recently called the idea that AI could destroy humanity a "hoax" — language that matches Huang's own talking points almost word for word.

That's where the worry comes in. Nvidia's biggest customers — companies like OpenAI and Anthropic — are actively urging the White House to take AI risks seriously. But people who build hardware, like Huang, tend to dismiss those fears. One author who studied the industry said the two camps have argued for a decade and neither has budged. Since Nvidia profits enormously from looser rules, critics ask a fair question: is the president getting neutral advice, or sales advice?

The catch for everyday people is that AI rules get written by whoever has the loudest voice. Right now, that voice belongs to a company that makes money when the rules are light. Meanwhile, the US and China still aren't formally discussing how to keep advanced AI safe — even as they argue over trade and rare earth minerals. Fewer guardrails now could mean bigger problems later, and the rest of us live with whatever gets decided.