Huang takes a live Trump call onstage: 'We're not going to let' an AI slowdown happen

Jensen Huang was onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday morning when his phone rang with a call he could not send to voicemail. It was President Donald Trump, and the Nvidia CEO put him on speaker so the room could listen in.

The call put the two men on the same side of a question that has split the AI industry: whether to slow down. According to TechCrunch, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay over the weekend calling to "slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI." SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have publicly said they agree with Amodei, while Huang's position has diverged.

"They're just playing right in the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen," Trump said on the call. "That could be political people. It could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax." "You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir," Huang replied, as the crowd broke into applause.

The politics behind the moment are about data centers. Trump and allies such as Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan have said the growing sentiment against data center construction is part of an international psyop meant to stifle American economic growth. Recent Gallup polling points to a more straightforward source of concern: seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their area, more than 50% cited effects on environmental resources, and about 20% worried about cost-of-living increases and quality of life.

Trump still hedged slightly. "We have to be a little bit careful … We have to do things and we have to do them prudently, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry," he said, adding, "So I'm with you all the way … We're going to lead."

There was also a staging gag. "I'm onstage with the besties," Huang told the president, referring to the venture capitalists who host the All-In podcast — Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and White House advisers David Friedberg and David Sacks. Trump joked back: "The great thing about life is Jensen can develop the most complex computer chip in the world … but he can't figure out how to put you on speaker."

The weight of the exchange is not in the joke but in the alignment. The company that supplies most of the industry's compute and the White House are now publicly arguing from the same script, using a "no slowdown" frame to answer calls for caution that have come from labs and from the public, and the speed debate has clearly moved from a technical argument into politics and public opinion.

What to watch next is whether that framing becomes concrete federal action — on data center permitting, power and land supply, or the posture toward AI safety rules — and whether AI labs and compute vendors diverge further in public now that Musk and Altman have sided with Amodei.