Nvidia's Jensen Huang puts Trump on speaker at All-In Summit to reject AI slowdown

A presidential call, live on stage

While appearing at the All-In Summit on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang received a call he was not going to send to voicemail: it was President Donald Trump. According to TechCrunch, Huang told the president he was "onstage with the besties" — the venture capitalists who host the All-In podcast, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg and David Sacks — and then arranged for an extra microphone so the whole audience could hear.

The Verge notes it is not the first time Huang has taken a call from Trump during work, but it is the first time he has broadcast one to a crowd. Trump opened by joking that Huang can build the world's most complex computer chip yet could not work out how to put him on speaker, as TechCrunch reported.

The argument behind the call

The moment landed in the middle of the AI industry's sharpest debate of the week. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay, "We Must Pace the Frontier," arguing for slowing the pace at which AI capabilities improve and for coordination between governments, according to The Verge. TechCrunch reports that Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have publicly said they agree with Amodei, while Huang's position has diverged.

Trump had already pushed back in Truth Social posts on Monday and repeated those lines on the call, The Verge reports. He said slowdown advocates were "playing right in the hands" of people who do not want AI to succeed — possibly "political people," possibly China — and called the sentiment a "hoax," per TechCrunch. He also assured attendees that "the robots will not be taking over," according to The Verge.

Huang did not push back, The Verge notes. "You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir," Huang replied, drawing applause from the crowd, as TechCrunch reported. He added, per The Verge, "We're going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America. Every industry, every company, every state, every people," and told Trump he was speaking to thousands of people.

Data centers, psyops and polling

Much of the call focused on data centers. Trump claimed, without providing specifics, that some communities were "dying" before data centers arrived and are now "really wealthy," according to The Verge. He told Huang the industry should act prudently but should not be stopped, saying "that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry" and "I'm with you all the way," as TechCrunch reported.

TechCrunch also notes that Trump and allies such as Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan have framed rising public opposition to data center construction as an international psychological operation meant to stifle American economic growth. The polling suggests a more ordinary source of concern: recent Gallup data cited by TechCrunch shows seven in 10 Americans oppose building data centers in their area, with more than half citing effects on environmental resources and roughly 20% pointing to cost-of-living and quality-of-life impacts.

Why it matters

Nvidia sits at the center of the AI buildout: its chips power the training and inference behind the very frontier models that Amodei wants to pace. A public display of alignment between the company's CEO and a president who calls AI fears a "hoax" signals which way political pressure is likely to lean — against slowdowns and in favor of ever more data centers. That position runs into measurable public unease about data center construction and into a growing chorus of lab leaders, including some of Nvidia's most important customers, who argue the capability race needs guardrails. The phone call was theater, but the split it dramatized — accelerate versus pace — is now the industry's defining policy fight.