With the ongoing chip and supply crunch, senior figures across the chip and supply chain have found themselves vying for crucial supplies, whether that be HBM, GPUs, DRAM, or NAND flash. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is reportedly set to visit China, with the intent of lobbying the government to allow more Nvidia H200 AI accelerators into the country. Huang isn't the only senior figure in tech to make urgent trips to smooth out supply or sales issues, and they're growing ever more prominent.
Major companies are facing bottlenecks for the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout. It’s a reminder that no matter how big your company is or how much money you have to hand, some issues can’t just be solved by throwing money at the problem.
Sometimes, you need to have a face-to-face discussion. With supply chains now far more governed by allocation, lead times, and geopolitical friction, executive presence is becoming a key part of competitive deal-making. A CEO at your lunch table doesn’t just give you an inside line to the person with real decision-making power; it shows commitment, reassures shareholders, and shows that personal touch that can make all the difference.
Whether it’s for high-bandwidth-memory, glass cloth, GPUs, or cutting-edge wafers, CEOs from many of the major tech firms are heading to factory floors, board rooms, and restaurants across the globe to try to secure a better deal.
Making memories
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Huang is one of the most obvious examples of this executive attention strategy. He was spotted eating and drinking with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai in Seoul, South Korea, at the end of October last year, partly to announce AI data center build-outs, but also to discuss memory supply. He followed that up with a trip to the Apec CEO summit later that same week, where he met the joint chairman of SK Group, the parent company of memory maker SK Hynix.
Just 10 days later, he’s in Taiwan meeting TSMC CEO, CC Wei, not only sporting TSMC-branded sneakers, but to obviously massage the relationship between the two, as Nvidia leapfrogs Apple to become the company's largest customer. Huang is far from the only CEO who uses this strategy of face-to-face deal-making. OpenAI Sam Altman visited TSMC for a “secret” meeting in late September 2025, as well as setting up meetings with Foxconn executives. Both are major suppliers of OpenAI, while Foxconn is a major partner with Japanese investment firm Softbank, which is also invested in OpenAI – it’s all so circular.
(Image credit: Micron)
Reuters reported that executives from Chinese firms Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent were dispatched to Samsung and SK Hynix in October and November to lobby for increased allocation of memory chips. In December, Seoul Economic Daily reported that Microsoft, Meta, and Google sent purchasing executives to Korea to attempt to secure a greater supply of key components, such as memory chips. Google even allegedly fired staff who were unable to secure enough supply of memory, leaving it struggling to supply its customers in turn.
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