With the debate about regulating artificial intelligence raging in Washington this week, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his top ally on the subject: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
"The robots are not going to be taking over the world," Trump told Huang, who'd put the president on speaker while on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. Trump repeated a point he'd made on social media: that mounting AI and data center concerns are a "hoax."
While other tech leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have cozied up to Trump during his second term, experts told CNBC that Huang is exercising outsized influence in the White House. He's slated to attend Trump's high-profile state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.
Nvidia has been powering the AI boom since before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, supplying the graphics processing units used by OpenAI, Anthropic and others to train their models and run large workloads. Revenue surged to $215 billion in the latest fiscal year, up from $17 billion in 2021.
Huang's position as the leader of the world's most valuable company and the chipmaker at the heart of the AI boom has earned him the president's ear on the most important AI topics.
"Trump just likes winners, and Jensen's very good at speaking his language," Samuel Hammond, director of AI policy at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, said in an interview.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment, and White House representatives didn't respond to a request for comment.
Whether joining Trump for a candlelit dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, or closing a keynote by thanking guests for "making America great again," Huang has learned how to appeal to the president. Trump and Huang have appeared together at least six times in public since the start of the second term, including trips to Saudi Arabia and the U.K., and a recent trip to China via Air Force One.
Huang is pushing for U.S. AI to move faster while some of Nvidia's most important customers — namely OpenAI and Anthropic — are ramping up pressure on governments to regulate the technology as fears spread about its potential dangers.
An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, said he quit his job earlier this month because he feared top AI labs are "gambling with our lives." Coxon's resignation set off a firestorm on social media, prompting calls for increased oversight from more than 20 members of Congress.
Concerns were already swirling after OpenAI disclosed a significant security incident in July, when two of its models escaped containment, accessed the open internet, and breached the online AI repository Hugging Face to get a better score on a benchmark test.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited that episode in a bombshell essay a week ago, urging AI developers to slow how quickly they improve their most advanced AI models. Amodei encouraged companies to cooperate directly with the U.S. government, and reiterated his desire for "well-considered regulation of AI."
Amodei's "pacing" proposal was endorsed by other industry leaders, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis, who agreed on the need for a slowdown and additional oversight.
'Did no harm'
Huang took a different position.
In public appearances over the past week, the Nvidia CEO brushed off concerns about AI's risks. He said that predictions of doom aren't grounded in science, and that model developers are responsible for securing their products before releasing them.
The solution to safety concerns, Huang said in Scotland on Thursday, is "good old-fashioned engineering."
"There were incidents, and those incidents, thankfully, did no harm," Huang said.
Huang's position is largely shared publicly by David Sacks, a venture capitalist who previously served as Trump's AI and crypto czar. Sacks co-hosts the "All-In" Podcast, which produced Monday's event that featured the Trump-Huang call.
"The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on the same day as the summit.
Before the recent uproar over safety, Nvidia focused its Washington outreach on export controls.
Last year, Nvidia was pushing to sell its AI chips to restricted countries, including China, drawing sharp criticism from U.S. lawmakers.
Some members of Congress, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., have cautioned that selling Nvidia hardware to China could threaten U.S. national security and narrow America's lead in AI.
In December, Huang's strategy paid off. Trump announced that Nvidia was granted permission to ship its H200 chip to Chinese customers, and that the U.S. would collect a 25% fee in exchange.
The H200 announcement drew intense pushback from both sides of the aisle. Huang declined an invitation from Warren to testify before the Senate Banking Committee in June. The following month, a top U.S. trade official confirmed that H200 sales to China were underway.
Profit motive
Nvidia and Huang argued that banning Nvidia exports to China would be against American 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. The H200 is no longer Nvidia's most powerful chip, as it has shipped two generations of its newer Blackwell processors in the U.S.
But Nvidia's fate wasn't entirely up to U.S. lawmakers, as China's regulators mostly blocked imports of the H200 chips.
Nvidia's clear profit motive leads some experts to say it takes the concerns expressed by model developers more seriously than those of the chipmaker, because the labs are the ones responsible for the actual AI technology.
"Nvidia is the most aggressive in terms of, let's just make money," said Andrew Yoon, a researcher at CivAI, a nonprofit warning about the dangers of AI. "At every turn, they are really trying to just make sure whatever happens is good for Nvidia's bottom line."
Nvidia's ambitions in China will loom large during the state dinner on Thursday, when Trump, Huang and Xi will all be in the same room. The White House is also planning a meeting with major AI executives to coincide with the event, according to CNN. Other industry executives, including Altman, are expected to attend.
But Huang's presence carries extra weight. During a House hearing on Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked if Trump understands the threat AI presents.
"I would just say the president is completely aligned with Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia," Bessent said.
WATCH: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says safety is an engineering problem
