How Nvidia’s Jensen Huang – and Trump – jumped the guardrails

The Scoop

In January, the general counsel for what was then the world’s most valuable company delivered a blunt directive on chip export controls to more than a dozen government officials: What Donald Trump and his friend Jensen Huang want, goes.

“I was with the president when he and Jensen discussed this so I want to let you know what the president wanted,” said Nvidia’s Tim Teter, according to people with access to a detailed account of the call. “He wants this to go fast.”

People on the call fell silent.

At issue were proposed conditions on licenses to export Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, which included requirements that chipsellers know who their cloud customers were before shipping and conduct know-your-customer checks on any buyers purchasing more than a few thousand chips.

Nvidia objected, with Teter calling the cloud-customer requirement a “poison pill” for the company, the people said. Nvidia also wanted the threshold for the know-your-customer checks to be in the tens of thousands (the equivalent of billions of dollars of chips) and pushed for end-of-life conditions to only apply to chips that were facing export controls.