Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders.
Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said.
He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced.
Photo, Ann Wang, Reuters
That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes Apple Inc CEO Tim Cook, Amazon.com Inc cofounder Jeff Bezos and Tesla Inc head Elon Musk, a close Trump ally.
A representative for Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia declined to comment whether there has been communication with the incoming administration.
Huang earlier this month said that he would be delighted to meet Trump and “do whatever we can to make this administration succeed.” However, he said he had not yet been invited to the president-elect’s home base at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
Huang also said he expected Trump to bring less regulation.
“I think that’s a good thing,” he said. “As an industry, we want to move fast.”
Nvidia is facing a barrage of new rules and regulations in the final days of US President Joe Biden’s administration. The measures include steps to tighten access to advanced technology, such as Nvidia’s industry-leading artificial intelligence (AI) chips, to keep them out of China’s hands.
Nvidia has chafed at new export curbs unveiled this week, calling them an “overreach” and warning that they could be catastrophic for the tech industry.
“As the first Trump administration demonstrated, the US wins through innovation, competition and by sharing our technologies with the world — not by retreating behind a wall of government overreach,” Nvidia government affairs vice president Ned Finkle said earlier this week.
Nvidia and Huang have become the biggest stars of the chip world over the past two years. As the company’s sales have surged, Huang has crisscrossed the globe promoting AI technology, often in his signature leather jacket. Nvidia is the world’s most valuable chipmaker and only ranks behind Apple among all tech companies.
The chip industry would have a presence at the inauguration. Arm Holdings PLC CEO Rene Haas is one executive who plans to attend, a person familiar with Haas’ plans said.
Huang yesterday said that he had met Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (台積電) chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家) for lunch, during which they talked about ramping up production of Nvidia’s most advanced AI graphics processing units, Blackwell.
Additional reporting by Reuters
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