Jensen Huang was riding high.
The name of the company he runs, Nvidia, is a play on the Latin word for envy. But when asked last month, Huang could not think of a single thing he is envious of. “I have a pretty great life,” he said toward the end of a 75-minute interview with TIME, before tallying a list of things he is grateful for: his happy marriage, his adult children, and his two dogs, who earlier that day both received the all-clear on their ultrasounds.
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Then, of course, there was his professional life: running the world’s most valuable company, worth some $4.3 trillion. “We’re building the most impactful technology the world has ever known,” Huang said, referring to the chips that power the AI revolution. “For any human, this would be a dream come true.”
It’s unsurprising that the world’s eighth-richest man enjoys his life, but Huang may have had a particular reason to be so happy when we sat down in late November for TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year story. A year-long friendship with President Trump was blossoming, and more importantly, beginning to pay dividends. After years of getting battered by U.S. export controls that prevented his chips from being shipped to the lucrative markets of China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, it seemed Trump was about to hand Huang exactly what he wanted.
That became clear just three days before our interview, when Huang met with Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman (MBS) in Washington. After those meetings, the U.S. government announced that tens of thousands of Nvidia chips ordered by the Saudis and Emiratis—but held for months due to national security concerns that they might make their way to China—would be released. MBS charmed Huang during the visit with a discussion of the dozens of Nvidia-powered gaming PCs he keeps in his Riyadh palace, and told the Nvidia CEO that he was “grateful for everything that we’ve done to help him” gain the export licenses, Huang said. “He was just very, very, happy.”
There were also signs that things were finally looking up for Huang in China.
Back in 2022, the Biden Administration placed significant restrictions on what chips American companies could export to China, out of a belief that limiting Beijing’s access to top chips would help the U.S. win the AI race. When Trump returned to office, despite his techno-accelerationist agenda, it wasn’t clear whether he would rip up those restrictions—which built upon those he had designed in his first term. Indeed, at one point this year, Trump appeared to be considering strengthening chip export controls. Frustration on the Chinese side led Beijing to ban Nvidia chips entirely this summer, prompting the company to publicly declare that its China revenue had shrunk to $0. Huang was not happy.
But behind the scenes, Nvidia was lobbying the Trump Administration with a beguiling argument: export controls were counterproductive. They only encouraged China, this argument went, to accelerate its efforts to build its own chips, thus opening the door to a world where U.S. tech no longer reigned supreme—a huge threat to U.S. national security. In this worldview, Nvidia selling its own chips to China was a way of reducing the viability of that Chinese effort, and thus benefiting U.S. national security, all while reopening a market worth tens of billions of taxable dollars. “We want America to be the wealthiest country so that we can fund the mightiest military,” Huang told me. “I think that that is our way of contributing to national security.”
It seemed that argument was breaking through (despite protestations from many in the national security community, who say export controls are working just fine). On the morning of our interview, reports emerged in the press that Trump was considering allowing the export of Nvidia H200 chips to China—a significant victory for Huang and his company. These are the most powerful chips from Nvidia’s last “Hopper” generation, and are significantly better than the best chip that could legally be exported to China under the previous rules (although still less powerful than the Blackwell chips that Nvidia is currently selling to U.S. customers). Just before the TIME Person of the Year story went to print—recognizing Huang and other “Architects of AI” as the people who had the most influence on the year—the U.S. government confirmed that the rumored loosening of the export controls was indeed happening. Huang was victorious.
Sitting back in his chair at the end of our interview, Huang continued counting things that he was grateful for. He and his wife were about to spend the weekend in San Francisco, he said, cooking for themselves, and perhaps going out to find a good French dip somewhere. But one suspected the real reason for Huang’s geniality lay elsewhere. “I have a simple life, and I love that,” he said, smiling. “I can’t imagine a more perfect life.”
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