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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang met US President Donald Trump for the first time at the White House on Friday, as Washington and Silicon Valley weigh their responses to Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s AI breakthrough.
The meeting between Trump and Huang was to include discussion of AI policy, according to a person familiar with the discussion. On his first day in office, Trump revoked a Biden administration executive order focused on AI safety and has generally been seen by tech executives as accelerating America’s advances in the fast-moving technology.
Two people familiar with the meeting said it had been planned before DeepSeek stunned Silicon Valley with AI advances apparently achieved using far less computing power than US tech groups. The news wiped almost $600bn from the value of Nvidia, one of the biggest winners from spending on AI chips, on Monday.
Neither the White House nor Nvidia disclosed details of the conversation afterwards, or whether specific agreements were made as a result of it. Speaking with reporters on Friday afternoon in the Oval Office, Trump called Huang a “great gentleman” and added the US would eventually put tariffs on computer chips.
It was not clear if the chip tariffs were part of the discussion with Huang. Tariffs on chips and “things associated with chips” were part of a sweeping plan announced by Trump on Friday for new restrictions on imports from the US’s biggest trading partners.
“We appreciated the opportunity to meet with President Trump and discuss semiconductors and AI policy,” an Nvidia spokesperson. “Jensen and the president discussed the importance of strengthening US technology and AI leadership.”
DeepSeek’s AI leap has sparked calls in Washington for the US government to further tighten export controls on AI-related technology to make it even harder for China to make advancements in the sector.
On Monday, the same day DeepSeek released its latest model, Trump issued an executive order telling the state department and commerce department to review the US export control system “in light of developments involving strategic adversaries”.
Nvidia has long protested the expansion of US export controls that limit sales to China of its most powerful processors for AI. The Silicon Valley-based chipmaker has argued that constraining Chinese companies’ access to American technology would only fuel China’s innovation and development of its own local semiconductor industry.
DeepSeek said its breakthrough AI model was created using a fraction of the computing resources of US rivals such as OpenAI or Elon Musk’s xAI, which are assembling clusters of hundreds of thousands of chips. The final training run for its V3 model cost $5.6mn using just over 2,000 Nvidia chips, DeepSeek said in a research paper, although that figure excluded prior development costs.
Analysts at SemiAnalysis, a chip consultancy, have estimated that DeepSeek and its sister company, hedge fund High-Flyer, have access to about 60,000 Nvidia graphics processing units and have spent more than $500mn on chips to date.
Nvidia, which was the most valuable US company until Monday’s stock market panic, was co-founded by Huang more than 30 years ago, turning the Taiwan-born businessman into one of America’s richest people. He is now one of Silicon Valley’s longest-serving CEOs.
In a letter to Mike Waltz, the new US national security adviser, the Republican chair and top Democrat on the House China committee, said the DeepSeek advance underscored the need for “frequently updating export controls”. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator, has also introduced legislation that would prohibit the export to China of AI technology.
As the Biden administration tightened controls on what US chipmakers could sell in China since October 2022, Nvidia has continued to sell adapted versions of its AI chips there, alongside GPUs for the country’s burgeoning PC gaming market. Customers with billing addresses in China, including Hong Kong, accounted for $11.6bn in revenues in the nine months ending in October, according to Nvidia’s latest results.
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