Yahoo Finance

The Trump administration back and off of a chip crackdown on NVIDIA. This is coming after CEO Jensen Huang attended a $1 million per person dinner at Mar-a-Lago last week. For more we're bringing in Yahoo Finance tech editor, Dan Howley. That's a big dinner, Dan.

Yeah, I don't think they're serving Kraft macaroni and cheese there. Although I pay a million dollars for that. Yeah, this is a big deal. The H20 is a chip that NVIDIA is able to export to China right now. It's what DC trained their models on when it came to their R1 and their V3 AI generated AI models. And so the idea that this would have been kept away from China was a big deal and up for discussion. There were both Republicans and Democrats saying that they wanted it to be controlled under the export controls. And so that would have hurt NVIDIA's overall revenue in China. Now while they've said that they're not expecting any expansion, significant expansion in that, they will miss out over the long term because they won't be able to ship things like their Blackwell chips or their upcoming VR Rubin chips. They do still have this in their back pocket that they're able to generate revenue from when it comes to China. So it's a big deal that now they're saying that they're still going to be able to, or at least the reports are that now they'll be able to continue to hold on to that and continue to sell it for some time going forward. We don't know how long that's going to be or what exactly that means for NVIDIA's future chips. Don't expect VR Rubin to go there. Don't expect Blackwell Ultra to go there. But the fact that they're able to have the H20 and you know, perhaps future kind of, we'll call it nerfed, high-end chips going out there, still good news for NVIDIA.

And more broadly, you've been following Big Tech's relationship with the president, um and you know, this dinner, just one example of basically Big Tech CEOs paying a lot of money to get close to the president and trying to convince him of their agenda.

Yeah, I mean look, this started prior to the inauguration. We had companies ranging from Google and Microsoft to Meta and Apple, either their CEOs or the companies themselves donating a million dollars to the inauguration fund. We had them meeting up with him at Mar-a-Lago regularly. Mark Zuckerberg famously appointed Dana White, one of Trump's friends. And now reportedly purchased a mansion in DC, close enough to to talk, you know, walking distance to JD Vance of the White House. But it didn't save them from the tariffs until about an hour ago, maybe, right? You know, the I think the big thing to to keep in mind here is you know, we had Apple talk about $500 billion of investments over the next four years. Microsoft, $80 billion over the next four years. It's funny that it's always over the next four years. Well, I wonder why. But the the thing about Apple is the majority of their iPhone manufacturing is still in China. And so

And so still subject to tariffs.

So that's that's the thing, right? You know, we talk about how Vietnam has a lot of manufacturing capabilities. There are other Southeast Asian countries that have manufacturing, Mexico manufactures NVIDIA servers. So the ones coming through there aren't subject to the new tariffs. But you know, the clarity isn't there yet on which companies might get some exceptions. You know, Trump obviously just talking about that during the press conference. And then what what that means going forward and for how long this 90-day extension. Does that mean that, okay, well, the companies are exempt. They'll be exempt past that 90 days? I do think that, you know, when it comes to Apple, it's still kind of, you know, everybody's tense. One of the analysts I was just speaking to is saying that look, no company knows what to do at this point whatsoever, either through the supply chain on up, because there's there's just no real rhyme or reason to what's going on at this point.

Yeah, Jose Torres of Interactive Brokers is still on set with us, economist. Um and Jose, you know, you were just talking about the sort of silver lining potential here. I want to ask from an economic perspective some of what Dan is talking about. In other words, this sort of seeming pay-to-play environment that this White House has welcomed, you know, accepting lots of money and business relationships from the crypto industry, and then going easy on the crypto industry. Accepting lots of money and having these big high ticket dinners with executives, and then potentially working out deals. From an economic perspective, like, is that a positive negative, like what is that? How should we read that?

You know, I think it's a style kind of framework, you know, the president, the White House, they want you to come in, they want to talk with you. Similar to the nations, the 70 nations, 75 nations that Scott Beason, Treasury Secretary Beason, was talking about, they want folks from business, political leaders, to come to the White House and have one-on-one conversations. It's not a kind of status quo kind of administration. It's part of why the voter base decided to elect the Trump administration. You know, it's a different kind of style. Let's talk face-to-face, eye-to-eye, maybe that style. You know, you ask me if it's positive, negative, maybe it is positive. If you see someone face-to-face, shake their hand, maybe there's more accountability that way.

You also know, Jose, though, what this administration wants. What does Trump value? He values when you come out and you see investments. We were just talking about NVIDIA. What NPR reports is that NVIDIA promised Trump, listen, we're going to make new investments in AI data centers. That is part of the conversation. I mean, often you make that, if you can promise Trump there's going to be more direct investment, you get headlines.

Absolutely. And you know, he loves to be around the CEOs. He loves to, you know, he loves screen time, you know, and and it's it's part it's part of it's part of his flavor, it's part of his deal.

Yeah, it's just interesting that it's a million dollar dinner in order to get there.