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With help from a longtime Silicon Valley investor turned White House insider, Mr. Huang got the administration to reverse course on restrictions.
By Tripp Mickle
Tripp Mickle covers Nvidia and reported on this article from Washington, San Francisco and San Jose, Calif.
July 17, 2025, 5:03 a.m. ET
In April, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, received a blunt welcome to the world of geopolitics when the Trump administration shut down sales of an artificial intelligence chip the company had designed specifically for China.
Since then, Mr. Huang has turned himself into a globe-trotting negotiator as he has tried to persuade President Trump to reverse course. He has traveled with Mr. Trump, testified before Congress and charmed reporters in Washington. And he has courted allies in White House who have quietly supported global business interests despite Mr. Trump’s tough talk on trade with China.
That work has started to pay off for Nvidia. Last week, Mr. Huang met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and pressed his case for restarting sales of his specialized chips, said two people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He argued that American chips should be the global standard and that the United States was making a grave mistake by ceding the giant Chinese market to homegrown rivals.
Within days, Nvidia said the administration was changing course. It was a remarkable reversal that punctuated Mr. Huang’s arrival as the tech industry’s leading geopolitical player. It also underscored Nvidia’s quick rise from little-known Silicon Valley chip maker to the most valuable public company in the world as well as the linchpin to the tech industry’s A.I. boom.
Just last week, Nvidia, which controls more than 90 percent of the market for chips needed to build A.I. systems, became the first public company worth more than $4 trillion. Since then, it has raced past that milestone thanks largely to its return to China.
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