Trump meets Nvidia CEO Huang as DeepSeek rocks AI market

Chipmaker condemns Biden administration for 'undermining American leadership' following strict rules about exports

The rapid rise of DeepSeek hit Nvidia particularly hard, as the company has been at the centre of a GPU boom worldwide. AFP

For the first time since his return to the White House, US President Donald Trump met Nvidia's chief executive Jensen Huang, one of the most talked about Silicon Valley figures in recent memory.

Mr Huang also met Mr Trump's commerce secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, according to reports.

Mr Huang's visit to Washington comes during a precarious time for Nvidia. During the past few years, demand for Nvidia's graphics processing units has propelled the company to stratospheric highs and fattened the chip designer's bottom line.

However, a China-based company, DeepSeek, claims to have created an AI platform without the need for GPU-heavy infrastructure, although those claims have recently been challenged.

The rapid rise of DeepSeek and its claims hit Nvidia particularly hard, as the company has been at the centre of a GPU boom around the world.

Nvidia is increasingly caught in the middle as friction between the US and China increases. Reuters

Mr Huang's meeting with Mr Trump was likely a stark contrast to his company's parting words to former US president Joe Biden.

Though Nvidia's value skyrocketed to record highs under the Biden administration, the White House's increasing push for controls over the exports of GPUs began to rub the company the wrong way.

“In its last days in office, the Biden administration seeks to undermine America’s leadership with a 200-plus-page regulatory morass, drafted in secret and without proper legislative review,” read a statement from Ned Finkle, vice president of government affairs at Nvidia, released days before Mr Trump was sworn in.

The statement came after the Biden administration announced an “interim final rule on artificial intelligence diffusion” that it said would help thwart smuggling, close loopholes and raise AI security standards.

The rule was also widely seen as a way to maintain a competitive edge over China in the increasingly important AI space.

CPUs and GPUs increasingly important to making AI possible have become a major point of contention as the US and China's adversarial relationship continues to crescendo. Deepak Fernandez / Getty Images

US allies and partners – Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan and the UK – were exempt from the rule.

Other countries, meanwhile, fell into second and third-tier categories that can make acquiring US technology like GPUs more difficult.

“The first Trump administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where US industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security. That global progress is now in jeopardy,” Mr Finkle's statement continued.

A source at Nvidia later told The National that the new rules will make it harder for other countries, such as the UAE, a US ally, to build capacity for “non-frontier AI use cases”. Frontier AI is a term used to describe highly capable AI models and technologies that could pose severe risks to public safety.

At a recent appearance during a discussion about export controls at the Centre for Strategic International Studies in Washington, former US undersecretary of commerce Alan Estevez, defended the Biden administration's AI diffusion rule.

“The controls we put on semiconductors and semiconductor equipment have all been about impeding the PRC’s [People's Republic of China] ability to build the large language models that can threaten the US and its allies from a national security perspective,” he said.

“AI can enhance military operations, command and control, targeting, logistics, autonomous warfare, all those things are very worrisome.”

It is not clear if the Trump administration will maintain the export control rules.