In the rainforests of the Amazon, scientists have observed a rare symbiotic relationship between some tarantulas and certain humming frogs. A tarantula will scare away predators that would like to eat the frog, while the frog feeds off ants that would gorge on the spider’s eggs.
This is the kind of mutualistic relationship that has formed between President Donald Trump and Jensen Huang, the chief executive officer of Nvidia, the world’s biggest company by market capitalization responsible for more than 90 percent of the market for chips needed to build AI systems.
Trump can protect Huang from predators—harsh regulations, stalled federal energy approvals, strict export regimes—all while allowing Nvidia to feast on more than $10 million in government contracts. Meanwhile, Huang has stationed himself as the guardian of Trump’s desired legacy: American reindustrialization and AI dominance. Together, Trump and Huang are burrowed together in the mud that is fascist corporatism—but can it last?
Last week, Nvidia was reportedly still haggling with the U.S. government over the details of its recent deal to sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, with the Trump administration taking a 25 percent cut of all revenues and sales. While it’s still unclear whether China will actually agree to buy the chips, the tenuous deal was still a major victory for Huang, who has spent months cozying up to Trump.
Trump and Huang’s seemingly symbiotic relationship began in April, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick invited the tech titan to Mar-a-Lago to sing for his supper. Lutnick and Huang had started off on good footing themselves just a few months earlier, when Lutnick called him to offer a direct line to Trump.
“He started our conversation with, ‘Jensen, this is Secretary Lutnick,” Huang recounted during an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast in December. “‘I just want to let you know that you’re a national treasure. Nvidia is a national treasure. And whenever you need access to the president, the administration, you call us.’”
“And it was completely true,” Huang said. “Every single time I called, if I needed something, I want to get something off my chest, express some concern, they’re always available.”
The Trump administration had warned Nvidia earlier in April that it planned to stop the sale of AI chips to China. Huang’s Mar-a-Lago invitation was so he could make a last-ditch appeal to prevent his company from being locked out of the second-largest computing market in the world, The New York Times reported.
Huang attended a $1 million-a-seat dinner at the resort and spent the evening urging Trump not to curb chip sales, highlighting the fact that Nvidia had spent several hundred billion dollars in U.S. investment. Whatever Huang said to Trump over their gold-rimmed plates must have worked, because Trump reversed course shortly after..
In May, Huang joined Trump in the Middle East, where the president announced a chip deal with Saudi Arabia that caused Huang’s net worth to surge by $12 billion in a single day. During that trip, Trump demonstrated how he could use Nvidia to make himself rich, too. The president announced that he would reverse policy in order to permit the United Arab Emirates to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips every year. In return, Trump’s World Liberty Financial pocketed $2 billion from a UAE-backed investment firm.
By October, Nvidia became the first company to be valued at a $5 trillion market cap, and Huang was ready to shout his love for Trump from the rooftops.
“I come with only one purpose,” Huang told reporters at Nvidia’s inaugural tech conference in Washington, D.C., that same month. “To inform and to be in service of the president as he thinks about how to make America great.”
Speaking at a panel with Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Huang punctuated every answer with “President Trump,” stressing how hard the president was working to reinvigorate domestic manufacturing and praising Trump’s tariffs. As Quartz reported, “The tone wasn’t defiant or even diplomatic. It was devotional.” The Amazonian frog, it seemed, had an exceptionally wide mouth.
Huang also confirmed that Nvidia would be one of the 37 major companies to donate to the construction of Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, NOTUS reported. “I’m incredibly proud and delighted to help contribute in a small way to what will clearly be a historic and national monument for our country,” Huang said.
Having scheduled the conference in the hope that Trump might attend, Huang even transformed his keynote speech into a MAGA love-fest. He insisted that Trump “deserves enormous credit” for recognizing that America needed to boost energy production in order to win the AI race. The president had “completely changed the game” for the AI industry with his energy agenda, Huang insisted.
“If this didn’t happen, we could’ve been in a bad situation, and I want to thank President Trump for that,” Huang said. He then announced that Nvidia would embark on a project to build seven AI supercomputers with the Department of Energy.
The CEO closed out his keynote address using Trump’s slogan: “Thank you all for your service in making America great again,” Huang said.
Trump wasn’t there to hear it in person. But days later, while speaking in front of world leaders at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in South Korea, Trump lauded Huang as an “incredible guy.”
It’s worth noting just how far our frog was able to leap in just a few months! In September 2024, the Biden Department of Justice announced an anti-trust investigation into Nvidia to probe complaints that the company abused its market dominance in AI chips. Cut to a year later, and Huang had successfully nestled himself into Trump’s orbit, exercising some influence on the president’s policies—and not just in the realm of AI.
Trump had previously credited Huang as being one of the “great people” who’d convinced the president not to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco, as part of Trump’s federal takeover of American cities.
And in December, Trump signed an executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence, just days after Huang urged lawmakers to oppose legislation that would allow states to set their own AI regulations.
Also in December, the president approved the sale of Nvidia’s second-most powerful AI chip to China. “He’s done an amazing job,” Trump said of Huang at the time, praising the CEO as a “smart man.”
Huang previously claimed that selling chips to Chinese developers represented a $50 billion opportunity. Having called dibs on a quarter of Nvidia’s sales, Trump had potentially earmarked $12.5 billion for the United States. This arrangement did raise red flags for legal experts, who viewed the deal as an export tax, which is prohibited by the U.S. Constitution.
To be sure, Trump’s fondness for a tech billionaire and Huang’s spineless sycophancy don’t come as a surprise. But the only thing Trump values more than money is power, and if he can use his ever-vacillating trade “deals” to control other countries, he will. And while Trump’s policies may be fluid, manufacturing is not.
Nvidia is still shaped by the very globalization Trump yearns to quash. Silicon wafers used in the Blackwell GPU, Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip, are now being produced at TSMC’s facility in Arizona—but they still need to be sent to Taiwan to receive advanced packaging. Until Nvidia’s products are entirely produced in the U.S., the company is bound by international partnerships for which Trump has demonstrated little respect.
While cozying up to Trump may have put Huang in the room with world leaders who could make him millions, a snap of Trump’s fingers can make those deals disappear just as easily. In September, Nvidia pledged to play a major part of Britain’s Tech Prosperity Deal, but just last month, the Trump administration put the deal on hold, hoping to squeeze more out of the Brits.
And it’s still unclear whether Huang can convince Trump to ensure his supposedly America First policies will still permit Nvidia access to foreign markets. Last week, Nvidia reportedly hit a sticking point in negotiations to sell AI chips to Bytedance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, because of a rule intended to prevent American products from falling into the hands of the Chinese military.
So, maybe the relationship between tech oligarch and authoritarian ruler is more akin to another unlikely animal friendship. While Huang may seem happy in the mud for now, he’s still at the mercy of Trump, who has repeatedly demonstrated that he is not a tarantula at all. Rather, he’s a fickle scorpion riding on a frog’s back, liable to sting at any time, surely drowning them both.
