TACO Trump Reverses Decision That Just Happens to Have Cost His ‘Friend’ Billions
Nvidia announced it would now be allowed to sell its H20 computer chips to China.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The U.S. has agreed to let Nvidia sell its advanced H20 computer chips to China just days after President Donald Trump met with the company’s chief executive, his “friend” Jensen Huang.
The decision, which the company announced Monday in a blog post, reverses a Commerce Department policy put in place in April that restricted sales of the chip, causing an estimated $5.5 billion in losses, the Associated Press reported.
Last week, Huang met with Trump to personally lobby for a reversal, according to the Wall Street Journal. He argued that allowing Nvidia to sell its technology worldwide would result in American companies dominating artificial intelligence instead of Chinese companies.
The chips are used in cutting-edge data centers that train AI models and operate AI applications.
Jensen Huang personally lobbied President Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to let Nvidia sell its H20 computer chips to China.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Doing business in China would allow Nvidia to tap the country’s AI talent, Huang reportedly told Trump. He made a similar case to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the Journal.
Speaking to reporters in Beijing on Monday, Huang said that half of the world’s AI researchers are based in China.
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Trump had previously described the Taiwan-born businessman, who moved to the U.S. at age 9 and studied electrical engineering at Stanford University, as “my friend” in Saudi Arabia in May, the Journal reported.
Huang was part of a posse of tech leaders—which included Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk and Alphabet chief investment officer Ruth Porat—who accompanied Trump to Saudi Arabia for a Saudi-U.S. business investment forum.
Jensen Huang and Elon Musk were among the tech leaders who accompanied President Trump to Saudi Arabia in May.
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
The Nvidia chief has generally tried to stay out of politics but was forced to enter the fray thanks to the president’s wild pendulum swings on tariff and export control policies, the latter of which Huang called a “failure” in May, according to the Journal.
The president has flip-flopped so much on trade threats that in May Wall Street traders nicknamed him “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out.”
Huang spoke at the White House in late April during an “Investing in America” event highlighting domestic manufacturing investments. Nvidia had recently announced that it was working to build its AI supercomputers entirely in the U.S.
During his remarks, Huang gushed that without Trump’s “leadership, his policies, his support and very importantly his strong encouragement—and I mean his strong encouragement—frankly manufacturing in the United State wouldn’t have accelerated to this pace.”
Nvidia has eclipsed Apple, Microsoft and Google to become the most valuable company in the world on the back of the AI boom, and last week became the first company to hit a $4 trillion market valuation.
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