Parmy Olson, Columnist

Nvidia's Mar-a-Lago Dinner Looks Like a Raw Deal for US AI

CEO Jensen Huang appears to have convinced Trump to let it keep selling valuable AI chips to China. That could put the US and Europe on the back foot.

April 14, 2025 at 3:33 PM UTC

By Parmy Olson

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Jensen Huang
Photographer: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

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Dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago is never about the food. It can brighten a company’s prospects and potentially change the course of history. After Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang attended a recent dinner at the US president’s Florida residence, the White House paused planned restrictions on the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, NPR reported, putting an enormous question mark over its efforts to keep Chinese artificial intelligence from racing ahead.

The H20 isn’t Nvidia’s most innovative AI chip, but it’s the most advanced version the company can legally sell to China. It’s so strategically valuable that tech firms there spent $16 billion stockpiling the components in the first three months of 2025, according to The Information tech news site, in anticipation of stronger export controls.