NVIDIA Founder Jensen Huang Condemns Trump’s Immigration Policies

21 October 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

“NVIDIA: OpenAI, Future of Compute, and the American Dream”

Interview of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, 25 September 2025

1:22:41

HUANG: There are things that are done

1:22:44

um from time to time that work against what I just described,

1:22:50

um, [they are] making making foreign students uncomfortable, and being here in the brand threatens

1:22:57

the brand. Um uh let’s not let’s not forget that that it’s okay to be competitive with

1:23:04

China, but be careful not to be tough on Chinese. And so we need to make sure that that

1:23:09

slippery slope isn’t crossed. Um, you know, and so there there all of these things that goes along with with

1:23:15

finesse and nuance. But the fact of the matter is we know where we want to be. We know we’re in a

1:23:21

difficult situation. We don’t want to be here and President Trump doesn’t have much time to move us in that direction [i.e., to change his direction].

1:23:27

And so to the extent that we move in that direction [changing his direction], I believe it’s a good start. INTERVIEWER: I heard from a Chinese researcher

1:23:35

leading one of our leading labs in the US that three years ago 90% of the top AI

1:23:44

researchers graduating from universities in China wanted to come to the United States and did come to the United States to work in

1:23:51

our leading labs and he guessed that today that’s closer to 10 or 15%.

1:23:58

Right? So seen a precipitous drop. HUANG: That’s precisely a concern that we have. INTERVIEWER: So have you seen this? Have you

1:24:04

you you know you’re you’re paying attention to both markets. Do you see this? And what are the things we need to

1:24:10

do in order to reverse that? HUANG: Definitely see a greater concern of of

1:24:16

Chinese students um who who come here and um uh remain here,

1:24:23

and or many of them who come here for for school and are thinking about going elsewhere.

1:24:28

Many of them thinking about Europe. And so so I think I think we need to be super super concerned about this. This

1:24:35

is this is this is a source of existential crisis.

1:24:40

This is definitely the early indicators of a future problem. Smart people’s

1:24:48

desire to come to to America and smart peoples, smart students desire to stay,

1:24:54

those are what I would call KPIs, early indicators of future success.

1:25:00

INTERVIEWER: I think of it a bit like the Warriors. You know, if they have an advantage of recruiting all the best players in the

1:25:05

NBA, then they can continue to win championships. But the second that recruiting pipeline,

1:25:12

because of the brand of the Warriors, gets diminished or something else happens, um, then they’re not going to be able to

1:25:18

recruit the best future players, and you’re not going to win championships. And when I you talk about the American dream so eloquently, that being brand

1:25:25

USA, the right to come here and to to do what you’ve done. And you know, so I

1:25:31

hope that the feedback to this administration, it’s not just the administration, it’s also just how we as

1:25:37

a country talk about immigration. This needs to be the place that welcomes the best and the brightest,

1:25:44

that attracts, has a strategic plan for recruiting the best and the brightest and making sure that this is the place

1:25:50

that they want to work. HUANG: As you know, there’s in in there’s a there’s a phrase, and I didn’t hear

1:25:55

about this phrase until just a few years ago, China hawks. And and apparently that if you’re a

1:26:02

China hawk, you get to wear that label with pride. It’s almost like a badge of honor. It’s a badge of shame.

1:26:09

——

MY COMMENT: Back on July 28th, MSNBC headlined “These business leaders praise Trump. Their corporate filings sing a different tune. Publicly traded businesses are legally required to tell investors the truth.”, and reported that Trump has threatened to break NVIDIA up (as-if NVIDIA doesn’t already face enough competition from China and others). In this interview, Huang also said,

1:09:53

And don’t forget that China has some of the best entrepreneurs in the world

1:09:58

because they came from some of the best STEM schools in the world. They’re they’re the most hungry in the

1:10:04

world. 9-9-6 as you know. This is a very

1:10:09

producing the most AI engineers in the world. So the audience knows 9 in the morning to 9 at night 6 days a week.

1:10:16

That is their culture.Okay. We’re up against a formidable,

1:10:21

innovative, hungry, fastm moving, underregulated.

1:10:27

Yeah. Okay. People don’t realize this. They are very lightly regulated, right? Less regulated, ironically, than

1:10:34

we are in a capitalist system. That’s right. People think that they’re centrally governed. But remember, the

1:10:39

genius of China was distributed economic systems. Yeah. And so all of these 33

1:10:47

provinces and all the mayor economy has driven an enormous amount of internal competition, internal economic vibrancy,

1:10:55

which of course has some of its side effects. But this is a vibrant, entrepreneurial, high tech, modern

1:11:03

industry. And two, one, uh, some of the things I I heard, uh, they could never

1:11:09

build AI chips. That just sounded insane. Two, uh, that

1:11:15

China can’t manufacture. China can’t manufacture. If there’s one thing they could do is

1:11:21

manufacture. And three, they’re years behind us. Is it two years, three years? Come on. They’re nanoseconds behind us.

1:11:28

They’re nanoseconds behind us. And so we’ve got to go compete. Yeah, we’ve got to go compete.

1:11:34

And so so the question then becomes um what’s in the best interest uh what’s in

1:11:40

the best interest of China of course um is that they have a vibrant industry. Uh

1:11:45

they also publicly say and rightfully I believe they believe this is that they want China to be an open market. They

1:11:52

want to attract uh foreign investment. They want companies to come to China and compete in the marketplace,

1:11:58

right? And I believe that they, I hope I believe and I hope that would return to that

1:12:03

in our context. Answering your question, what do I see in the future? I do hope because they they say it um their

1:12:10

leaders say it and I take it at face value and I believe it because I think it makes sense for China that what’s in

1:12:16

the best interest of China is for foreign companies to invest in China, compete in China

1:12:22

and for them to also have vibrant competition themselves and they would also like to come out of China and

1:12:28

participate around the world. That is I think is a fairly sensible outcome and

1:12:33

we what we need to do as a country is to enable our technology industry which today is the I’m privileged to be

1:12:41

working in an industry that is our national treasure. We have to acknowledge it is our national treasure.

1:12:46

It is our best industry. It is our single best industry. Yeah.

1:12:52

Why would we not allow this industry to go compete for its survival for for this

1:12:58

industry to go and proliferate the technology around the world so that we

1:13:04

could have the world be built on top of American technology so that we can maximize our economic success magn uh

1:13:12

maximize our geopolitical influence u maximize this this technology industry

1:13:18

MY COMMENT: Huang is saying that in his field — which is “our national treasure” — China is “nanoseconds behind us.” He is saying that China, which Forbes on 11 September 2025 (just 16 days prior to this interview), rated as #7 in their ranking of the “Top 10 AI Nations: Global AI Superpowers” — and they ranked U.S. as #1 — is actually just “nanoseconds behind us.”

In other words: he reports that China is now racing past us in the one field where — led by HIS company — America’s manufacturing remains as being #1.

Huang is saying that at least in AI, Trump is a failure. He says it tactfully because Trump might break up his company, but this is CLEARLY what he thinks and feels about Trump.

And he ought to know, because he rose from being a middle class Taiwanese immigrant to founding and leading the currently undisputed world’s-best AI company. If he’s not an expert at that, then who is?

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.