The world’s most valuable company holds a D.C. mega-meeting, and gets political.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang turned his company’s annual artificial intelligence conference into a chance to lavish praise on President Donald Trump on Tuesday.
In his keynote remarks at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Huang said Trump “deserves enormous credit” for recognizing the U.S. tech sector needs more energy to win the AI race, and for pushing tech companies to bring production back to America.
“If this didn’t happen, we could have been in a bad situation, and I want to thank President Trump,” Huang said of the administration’s agenda.
Nvidia, which makes high-end computer chips used for AI, has been one of the largest beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s policies, growing to the world’s first $4 trillion company last summer thanks in part to market enthusiasm for the White House’s AI and energy buildout plans.
The California company also won the right to sell powerful chips to China, agreeing to share part of its revenue with the government — although Nvidia hasn’t yet restarted its business there.
Politics at a tech conference: Huang’s speech was notable for its sharp political turn. In previous versions of the conference, usually held in San Jose, Calif., his keynote has focused chiefly on the chipmaker’s technology and the evolution of AI.
But Huang has spent the past year working to ingratiate himself with Trump’s Washington, making appeals to the president at $1 million-per-head dinners at Mar-a-Lago and joining Trump on official state visits to the Gulf region and United Kingdom, where the president unveiled multibillion-dollar tech deals.
He even used the president’s campaign slogan: “Thank you all for your service in making America great again,” Huang said to attendees to close out his keynote.
Nvidia was among the dozens of companies that contributed to the construction of Trump’s controversial White House ballroom project. When asked about the donation by POLITICO at a press briefing during the Nvidia GTC event Tuesday, Huang said he was “incredibly proud and delighted to help contribute in a small way to what will clearly be a historic and a national monument for our country.”
Government partnership: Huang’s keynote at Nvidia GTC included an announcement that Nvidia is partnering with the Energy Department to build seven new supercomputers, news he also credited to Trump.
As part of that deal, Nvidia and Oracle will build the Energy Department’s largest AI supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory to keep the U.S. at the forefront of scientific advancements, according to Nvidia’s press release. The system, dubbed Solstice, will run on a record-breaking 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell chips.
Nvidia’s Blackwell GPU is its most cutting-edge chip, and marks the company’s first American-made semiconductor — which Huang also pitched as a win for Trump’s AI agenda.
“The first thing that President Trump asked me for is to bring manufacturing back because it’s necessary for national security, bringing manufacturing back because we want the jobs,” Huang said.
China on the agenda: Huang will soon touch down in South Korea, where he will give remarks at the Asia-Pacific Economic Council CEO summit, an event that runs parallel to the APEC leaders’ meeting.
Trump told business leaders in Tokyo on Tuesday that he is planning to meet with Huang in the coming days on the events’ sidelines, but when asked by reporters to confirm the meeting, the chip chief repeatedly declined.