At the recent White House tech summit, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, sat in the chair next to President Trump — his literal right-hand man. Later that day, Mr. Huang used the term “super intelligence,” just as the president prefers. In the aftermath of this summer’s rogue A.I. attacks, Mr. Huang has emerged as a leading skeptic of the danger this technology poses. As his biographer, I understand why he dismisses the risk. I also worry that he’s not seeing the whole picture.
When I first interviewed him, Mr. Huang told me that every problem — business, personal, whatever — is actually an engineering problem: You study the inputs, you study the constraints and then you get the outputs that you want. While writing his biography, I watched Mr. Huang put this approach into action. He engineers his business to ensure that Nvidia will be the default platform in industries like robotics and health care. He engineers his products to be better than the competition’s. And in 2025, he began to engineer the president of the United States.
Before Mr. Trump, Mr. Huang didn’t show much interest in politics. Now Mr. Trump and Mr. Huang talk on the phone often and seem to have a genuine personal rapport — Mr. Trump even picked him up in Alaska to go to China on Air Force One. Mr. Trump wants to be close to Mr. Huang because the president likes winners — and Jensen Huang is the biggest winner of all. Since its inception in a Denny’s restaurant in 1993, Nvidia has grown to become the most valuable company in American history, even taking inflation into account.
Driving the growth is the unprecedented data center boom behind A.I., which Mr. Huang has termed a “new industrial revolution.” Data centers can hold thousands of tall metal cabinets called “racks” that wire together dozens of Nvidia microchips into a modular computing unit. A new rack, about the size of a refrigerator, can cost around $8 million and, by some estimates, can draw more power than 70 single-family homes. In 2026, Nvidia will net around a quarter of a trillion dollars selling this and similar equipment.
The data center boom has made Mr. Huang the emperor of A.I. — the other big tech companies are borrowing money to access his products. It is a testament to Mr. Huang’s engineering prowess that no competitors have yet managed to gain significant market share in Nvidia’s core business of A.I. chips. Engineers simply prefer Nvidia. These are the self-described “systems guys” responsible for implementing A.I. at the circuit-board level.
Mr. Huang is himself a systems guy and that informs his view of A.I. I’ve interviewed at least a hundred GPU engineers by this point, and I have yet to meet one who was seriously concerned about runaway A.I. On the other hand, most of the software engineers I talk to are extremely concerned. Bill Gates recently warned that A.I. could kill one billion humans.