GoKawiilNvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the keynote address at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on Sept. 15, 2026 in San Francisco, California.
With the debate about regulating artificial intelligence raging in Washington this week, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his top ally on the subject: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
"The robots are not going to be taking over the world," Trump told Huang, who'd put the president on speaker while on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. Trump repeated a point he'd made on social media: that mounting AI and data center concerns are a "hoax."
While other tech leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have cozied up to Trump during his second term, experts told CNBC that Huang is exercising outsized influence in the White House. He's slated to attend Trump's high-profile state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.
Nvidia has been powering the AI boom since before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, supplying the graphics processing units used by OpenAI, Anthropic and others to train their models and run large workloads. Revenue surged to $215 billion in the latest fiscal year, up from $17 billion in 2021.
Huang's position as the leader of the world's most valuable company and the chipmaker at the heart of the AI boom has earned him the president's ear on the most important AI topics.
"Trump just likes winners, and Jensen's very good at speaking his language," Samuel Hammond, director of AI policy at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, said in an interview.
An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment, and White House representatives didn't respond to a request for comment.
Whether joining Trump for a candlelit dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, or closing a keynote by thanking guests for "making America great again," Huang has learned how to appeal to the president. Trump and Huang have appeared together at least six times in public since the start of the second term, including trips to Saudi Arabia and the U.K., and a recent trip to China via Air Force One.