U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he met with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and noted that the company’s leader understood his position on export controls.
Trump called Huang a “smart man” when asked about the meeting. When pressed on whether he made his views clear regarding which chips Nvidia could sell to China, Trump simply responded, “He knows.”
Nvidia did not immediately comment on the meeting. Huang’s visit comes as the U.S. administration weighs whether to allow Nvidia to sell its H200 chips to China. These chips are one generation behind Nvidia’s current flagship models.
During his trip to Washington, Huang also met with lawmakers. He warned that state-by-state U.S. regulations could slow progress in AI development, according to comments he made to CNBC.
Nvidia had also opposed a separate bill that would require the company to offer its chips to U.S. customers first before seeking licenses to sell them to “countries of concern.” The firm argued that such a rule would hinder global competition in the AI sector.
Later in the day, Huang spoke at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where Nvidia is a corporate donor. He dismissed concerns that Nvidia’s chips were being smuggled into restricted countries in large quantities.
He pointed out the scale and complexity of Nvidia’s data-center GPUs. Huang said each unit “weighs two tons,” contains “one and a half million parts,” consumes 200,000 watts of power, and costs around $3 million. He added that claims of large-scale smuggling were unrealistic, noting that someone “would have to smuggle enough of them to fill a football field.”
