After using his social media site to blast Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's push for the AI industry to slow down development, President Donald Trump went a step further on Monday.
With Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaking on stage at the All-in Summit in Los Angeles, Trump called the tech exec, and was then put on speaker.
"I'm telling you, it's all a hoax," Trump said, according to a video posted on social media by an attendee. "The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy."
President Trump has inserted himself into the raging debate about artificial intelligence and whether the model developers, principally Anthropic and OpenAI, are rapidly building technology that threatens to destroy humanity. Over the weekend, Amodei published an essay arguing for the intentional slowing of the pace of model development, garnering support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk.
Opposition to data center development and concerns about AI have been conflated into the same discussion as people increasingly worry that the technology is taking their jobs.
Trump published numerous posts on Truth Social, including one where he said those concerned about AI and data centers are "Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause." In another post, Trump said he didn't see any need for additional AI regulation, and called the recent AI concerns a "hoax" and "a scam." He wrote that calls to slow down building are only happening because the U.S. is leading other countries in its pace of construction.
After Huang put Trump on speakerphone on Monday, the president said data centers are the "oil of the next 20, 25 years."
He also joked that Huang, CEO of the world's most valuable company, "can develop the most complex computer chip that nobody can copy, but he can't figure out how to put me on speaker."
Trump praised the construction of AI data centers, which are being filled with Nvidia's graphics processing units. While Huang and Trump have appeared together in public several times during the president's second term, Monday's phone call further highlights their tightening bond and the centrality of AI to the U.S. economy, even as other policymakers urge regulation.
"I'm with you all the way," Trump told Huang.
Those opposing data center construction are "playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen," Trump said, adding that it could be coming from China.
"We're not going to let that happen," Trump said.
"You're right," Huang replied. "We're not going to let that happen, sir."
Chamath Palihapitiya, one of the co-hosts of the summit, posted on X after the session in reference to one of the videos of it, "This was surreal."
An Nvidia representative didn't respond to a request for comment.
