Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang emerges as Trump's top ally in AI safety debate

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during the keynote address at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference at the Moscone Center on Sept. 15, 2026 in San Francisco, California. Benjamin Fanjoy | Getty ImagesWith the debate about regulating artificial intelligence raging in Washington this week, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his top ally on the subject: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang."The robots are not going to be taking over the world," Trump told Huang, who'd put the president on speaker while on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. Trump repeated a point he'd made on social media: that mounting AI and data center concerns are a "hoax." While other tech leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have cozied up to Trump during his second term, experts told CNBC that Huang is exercising outsized influence in the White House. He's slated to attend Trump's high-profile state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality. Nvidia has been powering the AI boom since before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, supplying the graphics processing un...