Faisal Islam: What the boss of US tech giant Nvidia told me about China and national security

Jensen Huang has the air of the late Steve Jobs about him. I have interviewed both, and the up-close charisma - and occasionally scratchy genius - is shared.

Both sported a signature item of black clothing, although Huang opts for a leather jacket rather than the Apple founder's turtle neck.

Both are innovators revered in the tech world. However, Huang is now being investigated over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy.

Everything you have heard about Artificial Intelligence (AI) over the past few months - good, bad, revolutionary and catastrophic - is dependent on having the most powerful frontier AI models.

In turn they depend on the most powerful microchips, and for years that has been this very company, Nvidia, led by Huang, and his technology rooted in repurposed games graphics and the manufacturing prowess of Taiwan.

Names such as Gracehopper, Vera and Rubin mean almost nothing to the public, but are the names of chips powering the creation of AI models transforming the world.

I met Huang as he held court with reporters and offered words of encouragement for the UK's tech future during US President Donald Trump's state visit to the UK in September last year.

It was also right in the middle of his attempts to get Trump to lift export bans to China of some of the highest performing AI chips, specifically the H200.

An export ban on a less powerful chip had already been lifted. He was, I suggested to him, one of the few people who could walk into the White House to meet Trump, and a few days later meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing.

He made no secret of his views, nor his assessment that he had persuaded Trump of his case.

"President Trump is very clear. He wants America to win and and President Xi wants China to win, and it's possible for both of them too. And the reason for that is because it's not a zero-sum game. The advance of human society is not a zero-sum game."

He is probably the only person in the world that could have spoken that sentence with the authority that he might have heard personally from both these superpower leaders.

Differing views on security risks

However, his view about "zero-sum game" is not backed by many in national security circles.

Their view is that the race to the most advanced forms of AI is entirely zero sum, and requires the West - and the US in particular - to take critical action to hold back Chinese advancement.

The country that creates the most powerful AI systems, from the most powerful chips, will win, in terms of scientific development, of cracking encryption, economic growth and cyber-weapons.

He made a further argument: Far from being a national security challenge, it was, in fact, better for the US that the world "including China" became dependent on US systems, what they called the "American tech stack", with Nvidia chips at its core.

Huang then went even further than that, saying that President Trump "is very clear-eyed" about the idea that "this computing technology is not a national security concern".

He told me "any military is smart enough to build their military on top of their own indigenous technology, and not rely on an adversary to build their technology, build their military capability".

At that time, which is the same moment now being independently investigated over national security concerns and alleged Chinese espionage, Huang was making clear public arguments to lift export bans, and seemed to have a clear idea of President Trump's views.

More than that, he was also disputing the idea that his technology, in China's hands, was any type of national security concern.

Nvidia is the absolute epicentre of the AI tech boom in the US and of the global race for AI supremacy.

Even if the boom turned to bust, Nvidia is still expected to remain in rude health.

It has actual hard revenues of about $400bn this year. Monday's drop of about 4% of its value reflects new and extraordinary risks at this junction of tech and global politics, but the chipmaker is still worth more than $4 trillion.

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