President Donald Trump interrupted Nvidia’s all-hands staff meeting on Thursday morning when he called CEO Jensen Huang midway through, three sources who witnessed the interaction tell WIRED.
Nvidia’s all-hands meetings typically involve Huang presenting or answering questions, on stage, to in-person staff at the company’s Santa Clara, California, headquarters, while thousands of remote employees tune in to a virtual livestream. During the meeting on Thursday, Huang received a call on his mobile phone, which he stepped aside to take.
Staffers could clearly hear Trump’s distinctive voice through Huang’s onstage microphone, although they couldn’t make out what he was saying. Less than a minute later, Huang returned to the stage and resumed the company meeting.
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment on the incident. But staffers were abuzz about the president’s inadvertent interruption.
In a post on social media later that day, Trump congratulated Huang on Nvidia’s “incredible” quarterly sales and rosy financial forecast for next year. On Wednesday, Nvidia had reported second-quarter revenue of $96 billion, up 106 percent from the same period last year.
Huang regularly jet-sets to Washington to lobby government officials on behalf of his company’s interests—selling chips and building AI infrastructure—and has been in closed-door meetings with Trump before. But the president’s direct call to Huang came at an interesting moment for Nvidia: Earlier on Thursday, the chip giant announced a new employee-funded political action committee, through which it plans to donate to federal candidates as debate around AI policy grows. Nvidia and the Trump administration haven’t always agreed on how to regulate open AI models and sales of advanced chips to China. Bloomberg Law first reported the news of the Nvidia PAC.
The Information recently reported that Nvidia has been in advanced talks to acquire the open-source platform company Hugging Face, which makes AI data sets, models, and development tools widely available to software engineers who are building AI. An acquisition could be valued at more than $13 billion, Business Insider reports, which would almost certainly require merger approval from US antitrust regulators.