Trump to meet with CEO of chipmaker Nvidia

President Trump will meet with the CEO of chipmaking powerhouse Nvidia on Friday as the White House reportedly mulls tightening chip exports to China, a White House official confirmed to The Hill.

The meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang comes as competition between the U.S. and China heats up over artificial intelligence (AI) development amid the surge of Chinese AI startup DeepSeek earlier this week.

The meeting will take place at the White House on Friday afternoon, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told reporters Friday. Leavitt did not disclose any further details, but described it as a “private meeting.”

The popularity of DeepSeek’s new large language model, R1, stunned Silicon Valley and the stock market earlier this week, and Nvidia, a leading producer of the chips behind the AI boom, saw its stock price plummet nearly 17 percent by market close on Monday.

This shed almost $600 billion in value for Nvidia and raised new questions about the future of American-made AI and the money being spent on it.

Trump officials are in talks to tighten curbs on Nvidia’s chips to the China market, Reuters reported earlier this week.

DeepSeek claims it spent just $5.6 million to train its latest models, a number that pales in comparison to the billions of dollars spent by AI firms every year to develop new models.

DeepSeek also reportedly claimed last year it had limited access to chips and used just 2,000 second-tier Nvidia chips to train its models v3 and R1 as a result of the Biden administration’s tightened rules on chip exports to China.

Some AI business leaders have cast doubt about the company’s claims.

A Nvidia spokesperson later told The Hill the company is s “ready to work with the Administration as it pursues its own approach to AI.”

“The thresholds set by the Biden Administration are based on performance levels reached five years ago and achieved by leading gaming and workstation products,” the spokesperson added.

Jensen did not attend Trump’s inauguration due to being in China at the time, according to a source familiar with the meeting.

The Hill’s Alex Gangitano and Julia Shapero contributed.

— Updated at 1:40 p.m. EST