Jensen Huang, once almost unknown in Washington, this week won a lobbying victory that could be worth billions of dollars to the semiconductor giant he co-founded, Nvidia.
The White House’s decision to allow exports of advanced chips to China’s vast market, largely brokered by Huang, has left competitors wondering how the soft-spoken electrical engineer charmed his way into the US president’s good books.
Donald Trump, who previously admitted he had “never heard” of Nvidia or Huang, on Monday defied opposition within his own Maga coalition in allowing the company to sell its H200 chips to China, with the US taking a 25 per cent cut.
“I think game recognises game,” said a person familiar with the company’s strategy, of the president’s newfound fondness for Huang.
“The way Trump wants to control the federal government is effectively the way that Jensen runs Nvidia. There are no fiefdoms . . . and Jensen’s instincts kind of reign.”
The $4tn company’s success in courting the president is especially remarkable because Nvidia until recently had a threadbare lobbying operation in Washington.
Huang, who had not been a regular in the capital before this year, was initially sceptical of the “value proposition” of courting Trump after his re-election in November, said a person familiar with Nvidia’s strategy.
“[Huang must have] remembered enough from Trump 1 to know that he is mercurial as hell and you can’t really buy stability,” the person said. Others say he was simply assessing how best to help the administration understand America’s artificial intelligence sector.
When tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos flocked to pay fealty to Trump at his inauguration in January, Huang was celebrating Lunar New Year with employees in his native Taiwan, 8,000 miles away.
His early access to the president was brokered by Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.
“[Lutnick] started the conversation with: ‘Jensen . . . I just want to let you know that you’re a national treasure, Nvidia is a national treasure. And whenever you need access to the president, the administration, you call us’,” Huang told Joe Rogan’s podcast this month. “And it was completely true . . . they [were] always available.”
Donald Trump and Jensen Huang at the White House in April. Nvidia’s chief met the president privately at least six times this year © Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
But the company, which sells the advanced chips that power sophisticated AI models, was drawn deeper into politics when the White House restricted the sale of its H20 chips to China — as part of Trump’s wider trade conflict with Beijing.
Understanding that the president wanted companies to commit to expanding manufacturing in the US, Nvidia soon joined a consortium that has pledged to invest half a trillion dollars domestically over the next four years.
Huang in April flew to Mar-a-Lago to talk to Trump on the sidelines of a $1mn per head dinner. The administration softened its stance in the following months.
As well as meeting Trump privately at least six times this year and speaking to him directly on the phone, Huang accompanied the president to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the UK.
He was front and centre at the White House’s AI Action Plan summit in July, where he drew effusive praise from Trump. “What a job you’ve done, man,” the president gushed.
In October, Huang contributed to the president’s ballroom project.
The Nvidia CEO simultaneously began courting lawmakers. Huang made the case that blocking US technology from Chinese AI developers would not stop their advances but would encourage China’s own chipmakers to catch up.
He told the House foreign affairs committee in May that Nvidia’s absence from the Asian country meant “competitors like Huawei [were] already stepping in”.
Nvidia’s teams in China produced their own research on chipmaking competitors.
“Nvidia has focused on educating policymakers,” another person with knowledge of the strategy said. “Its predictions were often proved accurate, especially that China’s capabilities would accelerate, not slow down, if [Nvidia was] shut out of the market.”
Nvidia declined to comment on its lobbying efforts.
Jensen Huang at an event in Beijing in July. He convinced the White House that it was in the US’s best interests for Nvidia to maintain its dominance by selling its products as widely as possible © Kyodo/AP
The company’s advocacy on Capitol Hill was led by Tim Teter, an intellectual property lawyer who as the company’s top legal executive has become one of Huang’s most trusted advisers.
Unlike many of its competitors, Nvidia has made its case directly, largely eschewing established lobbyists and industry associations. It rapidly built out an in-house team, hiring a Republican lobbyist who had worked for Ivanka Trump.
“They have significantly ramped up their efforts in DC,” said a senior Washington lobbyist. “They had a one-person shop that didn’t lobby, and now have a much larger team.”
Huang’s efforts remained focused on chip exports. Nvidia’s primary role as a hardware provider — rather than a model builder such as OpenAI — meant it was not made to answer for job losses from AI or damage to children’s mental health, said three people familiar with discussions on the Hill.
Still, his campaign faced serious obstacles. Many national security officials disagree with Nvidia’s arguments for selling US chips to China, as do researchers at prominent Washington think-tanks.
Trump in July revealed that upon first hearing of Nvidia’s huge market share, his instinct was to break up the company.
Steve Bannon, the White House strategist in the first Trump administration who is influential in the Maga camp, blasted the deal this week, saying the president was being “badly advised”, and criticised Republicans for not speaking out.
Democrats including senator Elizabeth Warren have denounced Huang for mainly meeting Republicans, in a sign that the company could face more opposition if Trump loses his majority in the House or Senate after November’s midterms.
An initial deal to reopen exports of the H20 — for which Nvidia had to agree to give the US a 15 per cent cut — was complicated by Beijing’s resistance to these lower-specification chips.
Nvidia’s attention then turned to efforts to get the White House to allow sales of H200 chips to China, which are more advanced than the H20 though still behind the company’s latest generation.
Ultimately, Huang convinced the administration that it was in the US’s best interests for Nvidia to maintain its dominance by selling its products as widely as possible.
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Robert O’Brien, a former national security adviser to Trump who helped Nvidia hone its message to Washington, said “the US domestic market, as big as it is, is not big enough to absorb all [the] chips” from Nvidia and its rivals including Intel and AMD “and have them stay leaders in the game”.
“This is really strongly Jensen’s view,” a US official with knowledge of the negotiations said. “And I think everybody takes that view as being sincere.”
Nvidia has its critics in Washington. Republican senator Dave McCormick said he was “concerned” about the H200 decision.
A measure in a defence funding bill that would have restricted its ability to sell advanced chips to China was dropped this week. But a bipartisan bill seeking to restrict the administration from greenlighting Nvidia’s chip sales is gaining some traction in Congress, especially among those who fear the administration will one day approve sales of the company’s leading Blackwell chips to the Asian nation.
For now, Trump’s embrace of Huang’s position has led many Republican lawmakers, who called for tougher export controls in Joe Biden’s presidency, to stay silent.
“At the end of the day, it was a meeting between [Huang] and the president,” said a person with knowledge of the H200 decision. “That’s how this came about.”
