The Flip-Flop did not go unnoticed, in a complete context of commercial tensions between Beijing and Washington: in mid-July, Nvidia has announced that taking sales in China from its H20 chip model, its model star, popular to execute artificial intelligence models.
The new one carries the seal of a man: Jensen Huang. The CEO of Nvidia had to move the next day in Beijing, and obtained what she wanted before leaving, the momentary stop of an embargo that will cost her company 4.5 billion dollars.
The founder of the most valued company in the world (the only one whose capitalization exceeds $ 4,000 billion) is the new strong man in Washington.
Because the change of strategy, driven by the White House, owes much to the lobbying of Nvidia, which the company defends itself. However, Jensen Huang has multiplied public appearances and speeches, traveled to Donald Trump and even listened to in Congress as part of an investigation on the subject.
The one who rebuilt the “public issues” had to face the participation of his business, despite herself, in US diplomatic strategies: fearing the use of fleas Nvidia by the Chinese army, the Biden administration had banned the sale of H20 in Beijing.
Jensen Huang then pressed for a Copernican revolution in the focus of this problem: instead of considering the use of these chips as a threat to US security, the boss defended the authorities the idea that they would allow, on the contrary, maintain a competitive and military advantage. Beijing has already surprised the world with Depseek, a model capable of competing at low cost with the American models, and Nvidia defended the idea that the chips had to be exported, so that China does not develop their own version.
An argument that ended up paying. Two months earlier, Huang had already participated in the mega-of signed between the United States and the United Arab Emirates: Nvidia then won thousands of flea sales, when Washington established a strong diplomatic link with a Middle East actor, capable of financing their technological companies with hundreds of billions of dollars.
Better seen than Apple … or Tesla
Nvidia, which has 90% of flea markets for AI, has become a massive geopolitical weapon for Washington. At the same time, his boss occupied a privileged place with the administration, thanks to the decline of other great figures. Praise for years, Apple, for example, has seen its influence lately, due to commercial tensions. The iPhone manufacturer has relocated its production to India, in part, to avoid a possible blockade of its activities in China.
In May, Donald Trump commented with his CEO, Tim Cook.
Apple’s promises to invest $ 500 billion in the United States will not have been enough to appease the Republican Administration, which would have liked to relocate an iPhone production, for utopian. The same observation for Elon Musk, for a while, Donald Trump’s ideal ally at the head of the Dux (government efficiency department), which ended up leaving. The two men do not agree in depth since then and have been involved in verbal fair in social networks. Above all, Trump threatens to deprive Tesla with subsidies, while the company affected $ 6.3 billion in subsidies in 2024, and the six business companies total $ 20 billion in government contracts.
So they remain in the entourage near Donald Trump more than two main technological patterns: the capricious and powerful founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, a partner and about a long time. He has the attention of the White House in the purchase of Tiktok in the United States. And Jensen Huang, therefore, who has the ear of David Sacks, Trump advisor for AI and cryptocurrencies. Sacks, a self -proclaimed billionaire “Tsar” and a member of the “Mafia Paypal”, an influential group by Silicon Valley, joins him in his analysis of the technological conflict with China.
Nvidia is just a designer, not a producer
Nvidia fleas are also appreciated by all other California giants, non -competitive, or not interested, for the development of their own tools. Nvidia’s rivals, as ARM, have never reached their power, and NVIDIA graphics processing technologies (Graphics Processing Unit), video games, remain the most appropriate for the development of artificial intelligence models. Only Google has developed a credible alternative, TPUS (tensor processing unit): OpenAi has just bought it to diversify its supplies.
But Jensen Huang, however, will have to fight in the coming months. The United States Ministry of Commerce opened an investigation into semiconductors in April to understand the impact of this sector on national security. The conclusions are still expected, and in the context of similar surveys carried out in steel and aluminum, customs duties had finally been taxed.
Above all, Nvidia has an Achilles heel, in the commercial war began throughout the Trump administration: it does nothing. The “Solo” group designs its chips, whose foundation delegates to another company, TSMC, after an inevitable detour in the Netherlands, in ASML. However, the company is based in Taiwan, where China has long claimed its domination.
At the moment, TSMC is at the top of its art, with annual profits up to 61% published this July. The president of TSMC, CC Wei, also praised the return of the fleas H20 to China, as an “excellent news.” But the Chinese attitude towards Taiwan is still hostile. In the case of an invasion, it is the entire Nvidia building and its influence with the US presidency, which it would launch.
Source: BFM TV
