Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and President Trump reportedly discussed AI policy, DeepSeek, and hardware export controls in a meeting

Reuters reports that on Friday, Jensen Huang, CEO and co-founder of Nvidia, met with U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House to discuss American AI policy, export controls on advanced AI GPUs for China, and U.S. technology and AI leadership.

“I cannot say what is going to happen,” Trump reportedly said. “We had a meeting. It was a good meeting.”

According to the report, Trump’s recent meeting with Nvidia’s boss, Jensen Huang, at the White House touched upon several topics related to artificial intelligence and semiconductors.

The AI section of the discussion reportedly included American AI policies, China-based DeepSeek, and the implications of its technologies on the AI services and hardware market in general, as well as U.S. export controls on advanced AI GPUs. The Reuters report does not detail the semiconductor-related part of the conversation, though given Trump’s focus on the onshore production of chips, we can make some guesses.

“We appreciated the opportunity to meet with President Trump and discuss semiconductors and AI policy,” an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement by NHK. “Jensen and the President discussed the importance of strengthening U.S. technology and AI leadership.”

Nvidia is the industry-leading supplier of AI GPUs for training and inference, so when the U.S. government updates its export policies, this seriously affects the company. Earlier this year, the previous U.S. government announced new export policies under which Nvidia and other companies could sell advanced AI hardware without any restrictions only to entities based in the U.S. and 18 allied countries. There would be restrictions on shipping sophisticated AI GPUs and hardware to the rest of the world, including U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East. In contrast, companies in adversary countries like China and Russia would be essentially blocked from getting high-end AI GPUs. Nvidia has criticized the move as its current and upcoming products fall under the new rules, which might affect the company materially.

The Trump administration could reverse the proposed regulation, just like it reversed Biden’s AI development policies earlier this month. However, it has yet to make its move. There are reports that the Biden administration is considering blocking sales of Nvidia’s cut-down H20 HGX to China, which could cost Nvidia some $10 billion in revenue.

Another topic that might have been discussed is Nvidia’s reliance on Taiwan-based TSMC for chip production. Trump wants leading chipmakers to build their fabs in the U.S., but building cutting-edge fabs would take years. The only company with leading-edge manufacturing capacity in the U.S. is Intel. However, it is unclear whether the company has enough 18A (1.8nm-class) production capacity for itself and external customers is unclear.