- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with Donald Trump and criticized the proposed GAIN AI Act’s chip export restrictions
- Lawmakers have now dropped the chip export proposal from the annual defense bill
- Huang also warned that state-level AI laws would harm U.S. innovation and national security
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t known for wading into the political fray, but this week, he made an exception with some quality time in Washington, DC. He met with President Trump to argue against the GAIN AI Act and its proposed rule requiring U.S. chipmakers like Nvidia and AMD to prioritize domestic buyers before selling advanced AI chips abroad.
The act was pitched as a way to keep America ahead of China in the AI race, but it was not long after he met with the president that lawmakers removed it from the National Defense Authorization Act. Huang hastened to proclaim his support for export controls, just not this one.
“The GAIN AI Act is even more detrimental to the United States than the AI Diffusion Act,” Huang said in a press conference after the meeting. He called it “wise” that lawmakers are backing away from the plan.
For Nvidia, which is the undisputed global heavyweight in AI hardware, that kind of disruption would be like asking Boeing to fly with half an engine. Their chips already dominate cloud computing and generative AI development worldwide. Losing the freedom to sell to vetted international customers without a government-imposed queue would erode their edge in a business built on speed and scale.
Though Huang gave his corporate lobbying a patriotic veneer, he did point to more than just Nvidia’s bottom line as a reason to oppose the GAIN AI Act. The law would have forced companies like Nvidia to delay foreign chip orders while confirming there was no outstanding demand in the U.S. But giving American institutions and companies a fair shot at high-end AI chips ahead of foreign markets would, he claimed, slow innovation for rivals as well, complicate global logistics, and damage America’s ability to stay competitive in AI.
For most people, the impact of these legislative debates is indirect, but very real. If Huange is right, the regulatory bottleneck would slow the pace of AI improvements for everyone. Although if he’s wrong, it will make it harder for American businesses to compete if foreign groups can nab all of the most powerful chips.
Patchwork AI rules
That wasn’t Huang’s only legislative foe this week. He met with lawmakers to criticize a separate idea gaining traction among U.S. states: local AI regulation. “State-by-state AI regulation would drag this industry into a halt,” Huang warned. “It would create a national security concern.”
If AI laws start diverging wildly across California, Texas, New York, and every other state, it could create a compliance nightmare for developers. Imagine needing to tweak your chatbot’s features depending on which zip code your user lives in. Bills are circulating in at least 30 states that propose different standards for disclosure, bias, transparency, and safety in AI systems.
Trump reportedly echoed Huang’s concern during their meeting and has publicly backed the idea of a national standard that would override state laws. So far, the NDAA doesn’t have that kind of rule, but if it becomes a real problem, it might end up in the bill next year.
To tech critics, this is familiar territory: Big Tech pushing for a single federal rule to avoid dealing with 50 regulatory headaches. And it’s not as though the regulatory friction might not annoy the average AI user. It would be like 50 different versions of the GDPR, but without any way to fully comply.
The shelving of the GAIN AI Act is, depending on your point of view, a signal that lawmakers aren’t ready to clip the wings of America’s most important chip company, or that they are in thrall to powerful and rich corporate interests. Or both. And while the future of AI regulation at every level is still in flux, Huang has outlined what tech’s most powerful players envision as the ideal solution.
If you use AI tools, or will soon, this matters. It’s not just about export forms and legal frameworks. It’s about who gets to move fast, who gets slowed down, and how much trust we’re placing in a handful of companies to shape the technological infrastructure of the next decade.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
