Nvidia Looks Past DeepSeek and Tariffs for AI’s Next Chapter

On a Monday in mid-January, Jensen Huang held a party for a crowd of health-care and tech executives in San Francisco. As about 400 guests filled up the Fairmont hotel’s opulent Gold room, the Nvidia Corp. chief executive officer, wearing his default black leather jacket, worked through a routine of tech-themed dad jokes. “What do you call a robot that’s better at finding your pills than you are?” he asked. “Computer-aided drug discovery!” The night progressed, and Huang downed at least two glasses of red wine, a bit of the harder stuff and—to the amusement of many in attendance—let fly. Huang taunted Stripe Inc. CEO Patrick Collison, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology dropout, for not being as smart as his wife, and told Ari Bousbib, the CEO of health-care software provider Iqvia Inc., that his company’s name looked like “you fell asleep at the keyboard and then sent it in.”

Those who know Huang would recognize the style: self-assured, a bit guileless and goofy enough to come off as either charming or cringe. One key thing has changed, though: the size of the audience. The artificial intelligence boom has made Nvidia a multitrillion-dollar company, even if it’s not quite a household name. (There isn’t consensus on how to say the name. Nvidia’s official brand guidelines suggest pronouncing the first syllable “en,” but some people still use “in,” or even “nuh,” which is clearly wrong.) Still, it’s an undeniable force in global tech. Huang—now the world’s 15th-wealthiest person, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index—is constantly on the road evangelizing for Nvidia and AI. Sizable press gaggles have documented him slurping noodles in a Taipei night market; he’s held babies and signed countless autographs, thrown out first pitches at Major League Baseball games, led tech conference crowds in chants, appeared onstage with the CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Meta Platforms and Salesforce, and chatted privately at the White House with President Donald Trump.