In April, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was wrapped in the geopolitical world when Donald Trump’s government interrupted sales of an artificial intelligence chip that the company had specifically designed for China.

From there, Huang became a global negotiator while trying to persuade the US president to change his mind. He traveled with Trump, witnessed before the Congress, and courted allies in the White House that discreetly supported world business interests, despite Trump’s hard speech about China.

This work began to give results to Nvidia. Last week, Huang met with Trump at the Oval Hall and defended the restart of sales of his specialized chips, said two people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He argued that US chips should be the global standard and that the United States were making a serious mistake by giving the gigantic Chinese market to local rivals.

In a few days, Nvidia said the government was changing course. It was a remarkable reversal that pointed out Huang’s arrival as the main geopolitical character of the technology industry. It also stressed the rapid rise of NVIDIA from a well -known silicon valley chip manufacturer for the world’s most valuable public company, as well as the fundamental piece for the AI of the technology industry.

Last week alone, Nvidia, which controls over 90% of the chip market needed to build AI systems, became the first public company valued at more than $ 4 trillion. Since then, this milestone has quickly exceeded, thanks largely to its return to China.

“(HUANG) uses the same argument, even where it is unpopular, because it deeply believes that conquering developers’ minds in China and depriving Huawei from a monopoly market is the best way for American AI to win worldwide,” Brad Gerstner, founder of Altimeter Capital Management, has evaluated an important investor in Nvidia.

Kush Desai, White House spokesman, said Trump’s “US policy in the first” dollars in investments in US manufacturing and technology, which will “create thousands of quality jobs and safeguard our country’s national and economic security.

“Everything the president makes aims to protect the US and the American workers,” he added.

Information from the White House meeting was first given by the Wall Street Journal. The Trade Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Huang combined his approach to the Trump administration with an unshakable determination to maintain a point of support in China, often disconcerting colleagues with travel through the Pacific to meet with authorities while the trade war between countries climbed. In the end, Nvidia’s CEO campaign was also assisted by Chinese pressure in commercial negotiations ongoing with the United States.

On Wednesday (16), Huang autographs in an appearance in Beijing, while minimizing his influence on Trump’s decision. “I don’t think I changed your opinion,” said Huang. “It’s my job to inform the president about what I know very well, which is the technology industry, artificial intelligence, AI developments worldwide.”

Huang, 62, was a reluctant lobbyist. Electrical engineer for training, he used to consider trivial government issues, said two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous because they still work in the technology industry.

But he had to dive into Washington’s policy when the company’s AI chips became a theme in global politics. Fearing that chips could be used to coordinate military attacks and develop weapons, former President Joe Biden’s government approved rules by restricting sales to China. The Trump government has promised to increase repression.

After the republican’s inauguration, Huang visited the White House and met Trump for the first time. Nvidia’s CEO talked about AI and semiconductor policy, but later, the president told reporters that he could not tell if more banning NVIDIA chips for China would prohibit. Like Biden government officials, Trump’s advisers were worried that chips would help Chinese companies to match the US technology.

In April, the Trump government warned Nvidia that it planned to stop sales of the latest AI chip offering in China, four people familiar with the plans said.

US Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, invited Huang to Mar-Lago to meet the president and make one last appeal, the sources said. On the sidelines of a $ 1 million candle dinner, Huang tried to persuade Trump not to restrict chip sales to China, the four people said. He explained that the chip in question of Nvidia, known as H20, was much less powerful than what the company sold to the rest of the world. Losing access to China would harm American companies and help Chinese rivals.

Government officials who were later informed about the conversation thought Huang had underestimated the usefulness of their chips. The H20 was full of memory capable of processing complex requests, and Chinese customers were spending billions of dollars in it. Two weeks later, the government sent to Nvidia a letter interrupting chip sales to China.

But David Sacks, a Silicon Valley veteran investor who became the White House AI tsar, was more receptive to Huang’s position on China than others in administration, two people said familiar with the fact. Sacks didn’t like another Biden government rule that controlled AI chips sales worldwide. He also questioned Washington’s consensus that selling AI chips abroad would be bad for the United States.

Huang began talking regularly to Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, who works with AI in administration, according to these people. His concerns about Chinese competitor Huawei began to resonate with Sacks after Huawei announced a new AI system, which called Cloudmatix 384, which offered competitive performance against US products.

At a Washington conference in April, Huang urged management to loosen restrictions on chip sales. “China is not behind,” he said. “Are they ahead of us? China is right behind us. We are very, very close.”

Huang later appeared alongside Trump in an An White House announcement about a US $ 500 billion investment in US manufacturing. In a stance that Nvidia executives later said they were unchecked comments, Trump smiled as Huang laughed and said: “Without the president’s leadership, his policies, his support and, very important, his strong encouragement – and I want to say his strong encouragement – frankly, manufacturing in the United States would not have accelerated at this pace.”

The next day, Huang was called to the House Foreign Relations Committee, which is responsible for supervising the boundaries in sales of chip abroad. He criticized Biden government rules that limited semiconductor negotiations and warned that banning sales to China would hurt, not help, the United States.

He also countered questions about whether DeepSeek, which shocked the technology industry this year when he revealed an AI system comparable to US -made systems, had used Nvidia technology, two legislative advisers said with the meeting.

“Your goal is always fundamentally to provide the information that policy formulators or others in Washington need to listen or want to listen and answer their questions,” said Tim Teter, Nvidia’s general advisor, who accompanied Huang in Washington during this visit. “He did just that.”

In the following weeks, Sacks helped dismantle the Biden rule that imposed boundaries to the number of chips that Nvidia could sell to all countries in the world, four people familiar with the process said. The maneuver paved the way for Sacks to help Nvidia sell chips to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In May, Huang traveled to the Middle East with Trump. Sacks, now ally of Huang, negotiated a giant deal to deliver hundreds of nvidia’s most advanced chips annually to build one of the world’s largest data centers in the United Arab Emirates.

During this negotiation, Sacks and Huang began to advance the same justification to sell AI chips, two people said. They claimed that to win the AI race, the US government should encourage the purchase of American technology rather than creating a reason for countries to buy similar Chinese product.

In Nvidia, it looked like a big breakthrough when Trump called Huang a “friend” during the trip.

But Huang was not pleased to conquer the Middle East. He wanted a return to China too.

Shortly after securing the multibillionaire agreement with the United Arab Emirates, Huang traveled to Taiwan for an annual computer conference. He said Washington regulation on chip sales to China had only strengthened Chinese companies.

“Overall, export control was a failure,” said Huang.

Last week, Huang returned to Washington to meet with leaders of Think Tanks, political reporters and White House employees. His message was similar to what he and Sacks promoted after their trip to the Middle East: countries around the world should be encouraged to build on US chips and software.

“The US technology pile should be the global standard, just as the US dollar is the pattern on which all countries build,” Huang said during a Washington-recorded podcast with the Think Tank Special Competitive Studies Project.

Huang handed this same message to Trump last week at the Oval Hall, two people said with the meeting. Sacks was sitting near them, giving his support. At the end of the meeting of almost an hour, Trump endorsed the Nvidia chips to return to China.

Lutnick said at CNBC television station that approval was linked to commercial negotiations with China, which recently agreed to provide rare land magnets to American companies. The idea was to sell to Chinese companies Nvidia’s fourth best chip, he said, so that “they get into the American technology pile.”

Days later, Huang traveled to Beijing and held a press conference to inform customers that Nvidia was open to business. Huang, now the sixth richest man in the world, has talked amicably with reporters about his relationship with Trump. The mood was of joy.