At a summit in South Korea last month, President Trump halted a speech he was giving about how he was doing more than any other president ever to build data centers and employ American workers, and asked about a new friend.
“Jensen, who’s an incredible guy, he might be here,” Mr. Trump said of Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia. “I don’t even know. Is Jensen here? I think he’s around. Somebody said he’s here. How is he? Pretty good, right?”
Speaking at a conference in Washington within hours of Mr. Trump, Mr. Huang also had fond words for the president, praising the White House for dismantling regulations and encouraging investment in artificial intelligence. Mr. Trump had “completely changed the game” for A.I., Mr. Huang said. Then he jumped on a flight to try to join Mr. Trump in South Korea.
Those mutual words of admiration spoke to what has arguably become the most important relationship between the Trump administration and the business world, an unlikely pairing of a Silicon Valley engineer turned mogul and a New York real estate mogul turned president.
Nvidia, which makes powerful computer chips that are essential to A.I. projects, has been one of the first American tech companies to follow through on promises to President Trump to bring some of their manufacturing to the United States. And Mr. Trump, who closely watches how the stock market is performing, is keenly aware that Nvidia has become the most valuable publicly traded company in the world.
The company’s chips have also given the president a powerful bargaining lever with a variety of countries, including Saudi Arabia, Britain and China. They have even a played a role, which has never been reported before, in the administration’s peace mediations between several nations.
Much as the United States offered nuclear technology in the 1950s to countries that agreed to use it peacefully, the Trump administration has discussed selling A.I. technology to countries that end conflicts, including Armenia and Azerbaijan, said two people familiar with the administration’s actions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitivities around an emerging strategy.
In August, after the administration helped broker a peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, met with officials from the countries about A.I. and future technological exchanges between the countries.
Mkhitar Hayrapetyan, minister of High-Tech Industry of Armenia, said the cooperation on technologies started years ago, but Mr. Trump and Nikol Pashinyan, the prime minister of Armenia, had brought the partnership to “a new level of development.” He added, “This is an important part of our long-term modernization efforts alongside with the U.S.-Armenia partnership framework.”
Last week, Kazakhstan signed onto the Abraham Accords, a landmark agreement made during the first Trump administration to normalize ties between Israel and several majority-Muslim countries. The country also announced a $2 billion deal to develop A.I. data centers with Nvidia chips.
A U.S. official said the Nvidia chips played a minor role in the talks. But their inclusion in the discussions show how A.I. and Nvidia have become a tool for American diplomats and a president who is trying to compile peace deals as he campaigns for a Nobel Prize.
Representatives of Azerbaijan didn’t immediately provide comment. Those for Kazakhstan didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, acknowledged Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Huang but said that “no single relationship defines the second Trump presidency.”
“President Trump has close personal relationships with countless business leaders across industries — relationships that are paying off for the American people as the administration works with businesses to secure historic deals,” he said.
John Rizzo, an Nvidia spokesman, said the company supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to make more semiconductors in the United States. He added, “Nvidia has always worked to help the government understand our technology but we do not determine U.S. export policy.”
In his first term, Mr. Trump expressed similar fondness for Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, which was then the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. But the president was more focused on industries like steel and cars and appeared to have little interest in advanced technology, people close to him said.
That was before Nvidia’s chips became the one thing A.I. projects could not do without, and the soaring share price of Nvidia became an essential component of stock portfolios.
Mr. Huang has had good reason to cultivate a relationship with Mr. Trump. The president holds the keys to international and domestic regulation of Nvidia. He controls the licenses that allow Nvidia to sell to major markets like China, and can help the company’s customers get access to the electricity they need to power Nvidia’s chips.
White House policies have helped Nvidia accelerate its business. Wall Street expects the company, which reports financial results on Wednesday, to report a quarterly profit of more than $30 billion for the first time, eclipsing the incomes reported by tech heavyweights like Amazon and Apple.
Still, when Mr. Trump returned to the White House, his relationship with Mr. Huang was far from guaranteed. Mr. Huang had never spent much time in Washington and was among the few prominent tech executives to miss Mr. Trump’s inauguration in January.
About two weeks after the inauguration, Mr. Huang and the president struggled to connect as they met for the first time in the Oval Office, said three people briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A second encounter at Mar-a-Lago also went poorly, with Mr. Huang failing to dissuade the president from banning some Nvidia chip sales to China.
But this spring, their relationship began to blossom, after Mr. Huang pledged to invest heavily in U.S. factories.
In late April, Mr. Huang announced at a White House news conference that Nvidia and its suppliers would invest $500 billion in U.S. manufacturing. Days later, he joined Mr. Trump on the president’s first international trip and helped facilitate more than $200 billion of chip sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The president, who considered the deal a triumph, started calling Mr. Huang “my friend.”
“What a job you’ve done,” Mr. Trump said during a speech in Saudi Arabia. “We are proud to have you in our country.”
The Middle East deals provided a template for using A.I. chips as a tool of foreign policy, said the two people familiar with the administration’s strategy. For years, the government has strengthened diplomatic ties with countries by selling U.S. products like Boeing planes. But the Trump administration began to fold in A.I. chips and partnerships.
What also endeared Mr. Huang to Mr. Trump was Nvidia’s willingness to go along with the president’s interventionist approach to big business, some of these people said. In August, Mr. Trump suggested that the U.S. government take a cut of its chip sales to China, and Mr. Huang agreed. Though the idea appears to violate U.S. law, Mr. Huang said at the Washington conference that the Trump administration was working on a new regulation to permit it.
The global demand for Nvidia’s chips has made Mr. Huang one of Mr. Trump’s regular traveling companions. Ahead of a state dinner in Britain this fall, Mr. Trump mused that A.I. “is taking over the world.” He then turned to Mr. Huang.
“You’re taking over the world, Jensen,” he said, as he and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain signed a “Tech Prosperity Deal.” “We both hope you’re right.”
As he has become close to Mr. Trump, Mr. Huang has worried officials in Washington, including some of the president’s closest advisers, by downplaying the national security risk of giving cutting-edge chips to China. He has argued that the alternative — Chinese companies building something just as good — would be far worse.
In late October, Mr. Huang returned to the Oval Office and presented Mr. Trump with a shiny reflective silicon disk — among the first examples of Nvidia’s new A.I. chip made in Arizona. It was a marked contrast from Mr. Trump’s experience with Apple, which had promised for years to invest in the United States but never made a marquee product domestically.
The gift came as Mr. Huang was lobbying the president to allow Nvidia to sell a version of its more advanced chip, known as the Blackwell, to China. The company also wanted Mr. Trump to help remove other barriers to its business there.
A few days later, as the president flew to South Korea to meet with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, Mr. Trump ignited a firestorm by musing about selling advanced chips to China. “We’ll be speaking about the Blackwell,” he told the news media on Oct. 29.
The statement drew swift rebukes from lawmakers and Mr. Trump’s own advisers. Cabinet officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, raised objections to the sales for national security reasons, said two U.S. officials familiar with the discussions. The pushback was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.
By his return flight, Mr. Trump appeared to have reversed himself. He said that he and Mr. Xi had discussed chips, but “not the Blackwell.” In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Mr. Trump said that nobody would have “the most advanced” chips “other than the United States.”
The incident provided a snapshot of the limits of Mr. Huang’s bond with the president. And it showed that national security-related fears of China catching up to the United States in the race to build A.I. can still, for now, outweigh the financial prospects of the companies that make that technology.
Mr. Huang, who didn’t make it to South Korea in time to see Mr. Trump, hasn’t given up on the idea. In a statement last week, he said, “It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.”
Daisuke Wakabayashi contributed reporting from Gyeongju, South Korea, and Zolan Kanno-Youngs from Washington.
Tripp Mickle reports on some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including Nvidia, Google and Apple. He also writes about trends across the tech industry like layoffs and artificial intelligence.
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