Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jezz Bezos are among the powerful tech leaders lined up to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, but Nvidia’s CEO won’t be joining them. Reuters reports that when asked about his attendance, Jensen Huang said he would instead be celebrating the Lunar New Year “on the road” with employees and their families.
While Huang won’t be present at the President-elect’s ceremony, he said he will “look forward to congratulating the Trump administration when they take office.” Huang also told reporters outside Nvidia’s New Year party in Taipei that he discussed increasing the production of Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell artificial intelligence chips with Chung Ching Wei, the chairman of Nvidia’s main supplier, TSMC.
Nvidia is estimated to control 90 percent of the market share of AI chips. The company criticized a new AI framework announced by the Biden administration last week that would limit how many AI chips companies can send to different countries. In its blog post, Nvidia praised the more lax regulatory environment put in place by the first Trump administration and said it looks forward to “a return to policies that strengthen American leadership.”
Nvidia is notably not among the list of companies to have donated to Trump’s inauguration, with OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Microsoft having each pledged $1 million to fund the ceremony. Huang also hasn’t appeared at Mar-a-Lago to schmooze Trump directly, unlike top execs from other companies like Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.