Nvidia’s first ever GTC to be hosted in Washington D.C.—a conference that’s been deemed the “Super Bowl of AI”—was a rare occasion that brought together both government officials and the tech industry under one roof.
It was an opportunity for the tech executives in attendance to advocate for industry friendly policies straight to the government. Unsurprisingly, CEO Jensen Huang was first to take advantage of that opportunity to the fullest.
“America needs to be the most aggressive in adopting AI technology of any country in the world, bar none, and that is an imperative. We can’t regulate our way out of this, we can’t fear-monger our way out of this,” Huang said in a press and industry briefing. “We have to encourage every single company, every single student, to use AI.”
The leather jacket-clad executive spent most of his crowd-facing time repeating Trump administration talking points on bringing back manufacturing or lauding the President. He also spent time trying to make the case for the normalization of trade ties with China.
“As it turns out, the best benefit to United States is for American technology to be available in China to win the hearts and minds of their developers,” Huang said. “A policy that causes America to lose half of the world’s AI developers is not beneficial long term, it hurts us more. It hurts America more than it hurts them.”
Huang also argued that because China is a huge creator of open source software, if Americans retreat completely from China they might risk being “ill-prepared” for when Chinese software “permeates the world.”
The U.S.-China trade war has impacted so many parts of the global economy, but the tech industry has been at the forefront, with Nvidia right in the bullseye.
The Biden administration was first to enforce export restrictions on Nvidia’s chips sales to China, due to national security concerns and competitive fears. The restrictions got even stricter under Trump after Beijing landed a big blow to American AI confidence earlier this year with DeepSeek’s R1, a model that rivaled some of the best American AI offerings despite using lower cost chips. It showed the U.S. that Chinese developers did not need access to the highest tech Nvidia chips to make models that outperform expectations.
The few months of the Trump imposed blanket exports ban was a big hit to Nvidia: executives shared in a May earnings call that they were revising revenue expectations for the quarter down by about $8 billion because of it.
After a months-long noteworthy lobbying effort by Huang, Trump decided to relax the rule in July, but then demanded a 15% cut from China sales in return.
Now, Huang reveals there’s not yet a signed document for that arrangement.
“The administration is working on that, and until then, we don’t really have to confront it, because, you know, obviously China hasn’t decided to allow our chips to go back to China,” Huang said.
After Trump okayed the sale of Nvidia’s chips to China, it was now Beijing’s turn to take a hard stance on the chipmaker.
Chinese authorities have started discouraging local industry titans from purchasing Nvidia chips.
The reason for that could be because Beijing has decided to decouple its AI industry from American tech.
Chinese AI industry is currently dependent on American chipmakers like Nvidia, and that gives Americans an edge, especially when the only chips they allow in are lower-model ones. In the absence of Nvidia chips, China will have to develop their own high-tech chips that can rival, and perhaps even surpass, the quality of Nvidia chips. If that happens, the United States can be at jeopardy to lose its hold on the global chips market to China.
After Trump’s blanket ban earlier this year choked off flow of Nvidia chips, Chinese chip development ramped up. China chip stocks are now experiencing a major boom, so big that Cambricon had to warn investors recently that things might be getting a little too hot.
In its latest earnings call, Nvidia executives conceded that they were facing disappointing numbers from the region still because H20 chip shipments were yet to begin. Now, Huang is working hard to turn those numbers back up.
Huang took to the stage at the press briefing with secretary of energy Chris Wright, in light of the tech giant’s announcement that it would be building seven giant AI supercomputers for the Department of Energy. Wright shared that he is optimistic that the two global superpowers would soon have a trade agreement.
“China is an economic, scientific powerhouse, so we have some differences across the nations, but we have a lot of common ground,” Wright said.
Trump is currently in South Korea, where he is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping in a couple of hours. Huang said on Tuesday that he was flying out very soon to meet the President in South Korea, and he was notably missing from GTC on Wednesday.
While Huang refused to answer questions on whether or not he would be joining the meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping, he did say that he had “a lot of announcements to make there.”
While aboard Air Force One to South Korea, Trump told reporters that he might talk about the sale of Nvidia’s Blackwell model chips to China in his meeting with the President. He called the chips “super-duper.”
