Trump finds close ally in Nvidia’s Huang at key AI juncture

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is becoming one of President Trump’s fiercest allies on AI at a critical juncture for the industry.

In the face of mounting concerns over the future of AI, Huang is one of the few tech executives standing fully behind the president’s push to continue full steam ahead on AI, while others advocate for new safety guardrails or a development slowdown. 

Despite meeting less than two years ago, Trump and Huang’s relationship quickly took off, proving mutually beneficial for the two leaders. With the explosion of the AI safety debate over the past few months, their allyship is on full display. 

“Jensen is an engineer and that means he’s good at modifying inputs to get the outputs that he wants. And he has brought an engineering approach to Donald Trump,” Stephen Witt, the author of “The Thinking Machine,” a book covering the history of Nvidia, told The Hill. 

Huang “has come to understand that the president has a bottomless need for validation, public validation, basically praise and Jensen shamelessly just supplies him with that, with praise, with flattery in public and private too,” Witt said. “The outputs are that Jensen gets what he wants, which is no regulation of AI and the ability to sell his equipment in China.”

Nvidia, once a relatively obscure chipmaker, is now the most valuable company in the world. Its most highly sought after chips, known as graphics processing units (GPUs), are central to AI development, putting the firm in a unique position.

The company’s success largely hinges on the future of the AI industry, which is facing mounting scrutiny over the technology’s long-term impacts on society, jobs and the environment. 

A series of recent cybersecurity hacks, coupled with ominous warnings from AI researchers about the future of humanity, prompted some tech titans like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to openly call for a slowdown on the tech’s development. 

Despite calls from leaders and lawmakers to establish a national safety framework, Trump is going all-in on AI development and the data centers that power them, deferring policing to the firms themselves. The president has dismissed........

© The Hill