The biggest company in the world is Nvidia, and it’s been making the same product since 1993: a specialized computer chip called a GPU, or a graphics processing unit. Those chips do all the fancy, complicated math needed to display images, videos, and 3D graphics onto our screens.
Back in the day, if you wanted to play “state-of-the-art” PC games like Unreal, Quake, or Half-Life, you likely bought one of Nvidia’s GPUs (more commonly called graphics cards at the time).
“If you were a really serious gamer back in like 1998, you would be building your own high powered PC at home. You’d be up to your ears in circuit boards and soldering equipment,” Robbie Wheland, a tech and business reporter for The Wall Street Journal told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “And you’d be buying one of Nvidia’s graphics cards, and putting that into your awesome high powered gaming computer that you would play on the internet.”
Today, though, Nvidia’s product isn’t so niche. Their chips are more advanced, and they are now the hardware powering the artificial intelligence boom. “Think ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM, or Claude,” Wheland said.
Because Nvidia is now essential to the tech sector, that has made the company very important to the well-being of the entire American economy; the stock market can swing on whether Nvidia releases a good earnings report or a bad one.
The company, and its founder Jensen Huang, have also become powerful players within American politics, foreign relations, and international diplomacy. Wheland broke down the story behind the company’s rise, its business dealings, and the founder’s friendship with President Donald Trump on Today, Explained.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Tell me about Jensen Huang, the man behind Nvidia.
Jensen Huang is the co-founder and chief executive of Nvidia. He was born in Taiwan, which has really become the intellectual epicenter of the AI boom. And he moved to the US when he was a child.
Today, he’s not only just the CEO of the largest company on Planet Earth, he’s also an incredibly influential and powerful person in foreign relations, in international diplomacy. He’s a very good friend of President Donald Trump. And I think it’s not a stretch to say he’s one of the most important individual people on Earth right now, just given how much power and how much economic might he oversees.
If you go back to Trump’s inauguration, and you think about who was with him that day, many of them were tech CEOs, but Jensen Huang was not among them. Why wasn’t he there?
My understanding is that Donald Trump maybe didn’t even know who Jensen was in January.
He knew this was a guy who was a tech CEO, who had a very successful company. But when it came to his style of management; his style of deal making; and, more importantly, what Jensen could do for President Trump in terms of helping him negotiate international accords, he’s now become a show pony that Trump brings around to world leaders. He brags about how successful Huang is. He says this is really an example of American ingenuity and innovation.
But, I don’t think any of that existed when Trump took office in January.
Tell me about how this relationship develops, then, and evolves.
I have to go to 2022; we’re in the Biden administration. What they did was they took certain products, certain classes of products, which generally meant very powerful microchips and said, “You can’t sell these overseas to certain companies.” At the time, the AI race was just really heating up. But Nvidia was not allowed to sell its chips in China, in particular, because there were serious national security concerns and serious concerns about competition and not letting China catch up with us.
That was a big deal for Nvidia, because it really limited how quickly it could expand around the world. Fast forward to this year, and Donald Trump is back in the White House for a second term, and Jensen Huang obviously needed to revisit this issue.
There were a number of influential people in the Trump National Security Council who successfully made the argument that it’s a bad idea for us to be selling our most advanced technology to the Chinese. And, in that context, Jensen Huang starts building a friendship with Donald Trump because it was gonna be very important for him to be on friendly terms with a president, given how this war of ideas was shaking out.
In August of this year, he goes to Trump. He says, “What do I have to do to get you to let me sell this chip in China again?” And the deal they come to, after a lot of negotiations between Nvidia and the Trump administration, is that the White House asks Jensen to let the federal government in on their success by giving the government a stake in the company.
This is a huge win for Jensen Huang. But there’s a problem: The Chinese say to all the customers in their country, “Don’t buy this thing. It’s not safe. It has security concerns.” So, Nvidia starts developing a new chip for China. It’s called the B 30 A.
And, this is too much. This proves to be too much for people in Washington who are concerned about national security, concerned about competition with China. And they’ve actually decided, unbeknownst to Jensen Huang, that they’re not gonna approve high-quality chips to be sold in China.
And that’s where we are. Nvidia is still locked out of China.
You see Wong joining Trump on international trips, consulting with the president on high level issues. What has been going on with these two guys behind the scenes?
There’s a lot of speculation about whether this is another Elon Musk-type situation. President Trump always likes to have a tech billionaire who he can consult with and bounce ideas off of. One thing to know about Donald Trump, and I know this because I’ve spoken to him about it directly, is that he really likes people when they’re successful.
He likes that successful people are on his team. When it dawned on Trump that this guy, Jensen Huang, was just a really successful, brilliant executive, and he was building something really special and big and powerful in Nvidia, Trump really seized on that. It caught his attention, and he decided that he really liked Jensen Huang. They now speak often on the phone. Trump will call Jensen Huang late at night, pick his brain about things. Jensen’s a frequent visitor to the White House, which is something that he’d never done before this year, really.
But, in the last month, he has backed off of his seemingly unshakable commitment to let Nvidia sell its products in China. I don’t think it’s reflective of any kind of personality clash. I think that Jenssen’s been very good at managing the relationship, and he’s pledging his support to the most powerful president on Planet Earth using the language that that president loves to hear.
Does Jensen Huang want to work in government like Musk did, or does the guy just want to sell his chips in China and do what’s best for his business?
I don’t have any reason to believe that he does have those kinds of ambitions. I think that Jensen Huang has been thrust into this sort of role as an international diplomat, and as a lobbyist, and all these different roles that he’s had to play. They’re very new to him.
I think that his primary concern is doing what’s best for his company, selling as much product as he can around the world. Even more than that, he wants to get the whole world hooked on his technology and make Nvidia more central to the long-term picture of how tech develops and how AI develops.
