President Donald Trump is meeting Friday with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company designs and supplies the advanced computer chips that play an integral role in developing artificial intelligence.
The meeting at the White House was confirmed by a person familiar who insisted on anonymity to discuss the conversation between Huang and Trump. The person said the meeting was set up weeks ago and would enable them to get acquainted and talk about AI policy. Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, Calif., declined to comment on the meeting.
Nvidia had loudly protested a last-minute move by the Biden administration in January to expand AI chip restrictions beyond adversaries like China to more than 100 other countries, including Singapore. But it remains to be seen if Trump will follow through with or drop those proposed rules.
Trump signed an order on his first day in office last week that said his administration would “identify and eliminate loopholes in existing export controls,” signaling that he might continue and harden Biden’s approach.
The Republican president is banking on AI to foster economic growth and draw hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, but he also saw the performance of China’s DeepSeek AI technology as a sign that the technology can be developed more cheaply.
Speaking Monday to House Republicans in Miami, Trump called the DeepSeek news “positive” if it’s accurate because “you won’t be spending as much and you’ll get the same result.”
Trump said it was a “wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win.”
DeepSeek has said its recent models were built with Nvidia’s lower-performing H800 chips, which are not banned in China. DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from U.S. companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on troves of data. The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared on Apple and Google app stores early this year.
The meeting between Trump and Huang comes as leaders of a special House committee focused on countering China have urged Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, to consider the potential national security benefits of placing export controls on Nvidia semiconductor chips used by DeepSeek. They said the examination should be part of a review that Trump ordered on his first day in office that called on the secretaries of State and Commerce to review the U.S. export control system.
Rep. John Moolenaar, the chairman of the committee, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said DeepSeek made extensive use of a Nvidia chip designed specifically to fall outside U.S. export controls. The lawmakers said that the committee supports American AI innovation, and that support “includes imposing reasonable safeguards” to protect those innovations from China.
“This demonstrates what the Select Committee has long argued: frequently updating export controls is imperative to ensure (China) will not exploit regulatory gaps and loopholes to advance their AI ambitions,” the two lawmakers wrote in letter dated Wednesday.
The pair asked that Waltz look for ways to strengthen controls on shipments through third countries “that pose a high risk of diversion.” Singapore, the letter said, represented 22% of Nvidia’s revenue in its most recently quarterly statement, “despite the company itself revealing most of these shipments ultimately went to users outside of Singapore.”
Countries such as Singapore, they added, should be subject to strict licensing requirements if they aren’t willing to “crack down” on China using their country as an intermediary for shipments.
In an emailed statement, Nvidia said that its revenue associated with Singapore “does not indicate diversion to China.”
“Our public filings report ‘bill to’ not ‘ship to’ locations of our customers,” a Nvidia spokesperson said. “Many of our customers have business entities in Singapore and use those entities for products destined for the U.S. and the west. We insist that our partners comply with all applicable laws, and if we receive any information to the contrary, act accordingly.”
