The Chip Whisperer

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_1** (0:36)
Rowhome Productions.

**Jane Perlez** (0:39)
This project is made possible by the generous support of the Carnegie Corporation. It all started with a conversation between three engineers at a corner table in a diner.

**Jensen Huang** (0:52)
Right here to this denny's, sat right back there, and the three of us decided to start the company.

**Jane Perlez** (0:57)
Jensen Huang, Curtis Priam and Chris Malachowski wanted to improve video game graphics to create a new faster chip to do that. And so, Nvidia was born. Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, likes to choke that he bought Nvidia stock at just the right time, giving his lawyer all of the cash in his wallet to incorporate the company.

**Jensen Huang** (1:24)
And for $200, I bought 15%, I think it was 20% of Nvidia. So, it was a good deal.

**Jane Perlez** (1:34)
Joking aside, today, Nvidia is worth trillions. The advanced chips that they developed are now used for AI. And that humble engineer in the back booth at Denny's is cutting more of a rock star figure these days, wearing leather jackets, hobnobbing with celebrities, giving the keynote at this year's Computer Electronic Show in Vegas, before thousands of adoring tech groupies.

**Jensen Huang** (2:00)
Hello, Las Vegas! Happy New Year! Welcome to CES! I'm so happy to see all of you. You got 3,000 people in this auditorium. There's 2,000 people in a courtyard watching us. There's another 1,000 people, apparently, in the fourth floor all watching this keynote. And, of course, millions around the world are going to be watching this, the kickoff this new year.

**Jane Perlez** (2:22)
He certainly knows how to play for a crowd. He also knows how to play both Washington and Beijing. He speaks Chinese and English, and he moves seamlessly, it seems, in both worlds. So I was curious to learn more about the Taiwan-born American CEO who holds the keys to artificial intelligence. Whose side is he really on?
I'm Jane Perlez, and this is Face-Off. Today on the show, Jensen Huang and inside the rise of one of tech's most important power brokers. Today's guest is a perfect guide to the ins and outs of this rise. Tripp Mickle is a technology reporter for The New York Times. He's been following Jensen Huang's story closely. We started our conversation talking about the latest victory for Huang, Trump's reversal in December to allow advanced Nvidia chips to be sold in China.

**Tripp Mickle** (3:27)
This was a dramatic shift in US policy in a span of seven or eight months with a single president where he went from restricting Nvidia's shipment of any chips to China to allowing and accommodating the most powerful chip that China's ever been able to buy from Nvidia under US law.

**Jane Perlez** (3:52)
Sounds like quite a drama inside the administration from what you've just said.

**Tripp Mickle** (3:57)
Yeah, no, there was no definitive and clear point of view on this within the administration. There were different camps with different points of view and perspective, and you could break those down by looking at some of the characters inside of the administration and who weighed in favor of loosening restrictions and who was opposed. David Sachs, who was the AIs are for Donald Trump and is continuing to run his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, while he advises and consults on AI matters, was very supportive of allowing Nvidia to sell more powerful chips to China, because he championed this idea that Jensen favored, which is persuading the Chinese to use American AI systems from Nvidia, rather than choosing to develop and deploy their own systems from Huawei. Now, that point of view was weighed against the point of view of more national security-minded officials, including Marco Rubio, Jameson Greer, and others who had intervened just a few months before this decision to persuade President Trump to not allow Nvidia to sell a more powerful chip, slightly more powerful than the one they're going to be allowed to sell, this H200, called the Blackwell. These competing visions were just jockeying back and forth inside the administration for a span of many months trying to persuade President Trump to take their point of view. In the middle of this, Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, was going to the White House regularly. I mean, he was there almost every other month, if not every month, since Lanny and the president's good graces around May or June. And he proved persuasive with the president. Often the way President Trump makes a decision is it's based on the last person he talked to, and days after Jensen Huang met with the president about this H200 idea, President Trump signed off on it.