Jensen Huang, the CEO of chip technology giant Nvidia, confirmed on Tuesday that the company is contributing to President Donald Trump’s ballroom project at the White House.
“First of all, 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 told reporters at a panel with Energy Secretary Chris Wright at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference in Washington.
CBS News reported last week that Nvidia was among the 37 donors that would contribute to the construction of the estimated $300 million presidential ballroom. Donors, including other tech giants like Google and Amazon, can reportedly have their names engraved inside the White House in exchange for contributing to the project.
“Why shouldn’t we want Washington, D.C., to be the best home-court advantage of any country in the world? Do you guys agree?” Huang asked the room full of reporters.
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The comments were just one of the multiple times Huang went out of his way to compliment Trump during the otherwise technical conference — which has traditionally been held in California — and were examples of how closely aligned the tech industry has become with the Trump administration.
“President Trump has repeatedly said that he wants America to win. That it’s imperative that we win the AI race,” Huang said. “Almost every single conversation I’ve had with President Trump, it always comes down to manufacturing in America to bring back jobs … manufacturing in the U.S. so we can make America rich again.”
“No one works as hard as him, 100% of his phone calls to me are at 10:30 at night — his time, not my time. And this president is working like mad to help America be great,” Huang said.
While a big part of the conference centered around Nvidia’s newest chips and the company’s vision to build automated factories with AI-powered humanoid robots, Huang’s public addresses were filled with gestures aimed toward Trump.
Huang closed his keynote remarks by saying, “Thank you for your service in making America great again” to the Washington audience. He also voiced support for many of the administration’s taking points about reshoring manufacturing to America.
Other officials also received praise from the influential CEO, who has not shied away from expressing his support for the Trump administration.
Only moments after announcing that Nvidia would be partnering with the Department of Energy to manufacture seven supercomputers for government research, Huang praised Wright for his “energy” and “enthusiasm” to advance science and energy in the U.S.
Right-wingers spent years criticizing tech executives for their content-moderation policies and appeals to the progressive sensibilities of Silicon Valley.
But after Trump returned to office with few guardrails, tech executives like Huang are aligning themselves with Trump and openly voicing their grievances with past administrations.
“We also need to be in China to win their developers,” Huang, who has tried to convince leaders of both parties to allow Nvidia to sell its chips to China, told reporters.
“A policy that causes America to lose half of the world’s AI developers is not beneficial long term,” he added. “That is something that I advocated for in the last administration, and it just didn’t fall right; because somehow there’s a belief that shutting them out, hurting them, is better for us — and it’s not.”
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