A call you can't ignore

Jensen Huang was onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday morning when his phone rang. It was President Donald Trump.

On speaker, in public

Huang asked stagehands for an extra mic and held the call up for the whole room to hear. A PR team's nightmare, played live.

“I'm onstage with the besties”

Trump gets a joke in

The president opened by ribbing Huang about the mechanics of a phone. Huang was actually trying to amplify the call, not fumbling with it.

“Jensen can develop the most complex computer chip in the world … but he can't figure out how to put you on speaker”

The slowdown debate

The panel had been chewing on Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's call to slow the pace of AI capability gains. Elon Musk and Sam Altman have said they agree.

“slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI”

Huang breaks from the pack

Where Musk and Altman sided with Amodei, Huang has gone the other way. Trump used the call to back him in front of the crowd.

“You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir.”

Calling it a hoax

Trump framed slowdown talk as a gift to rivals, naming political opponents and China as the beneficiaries. The room applauded.

“They're just playing right in the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen.”

What the polling shows

Trump allies call anti-data-center sentiment a foreign psyop. Gallup found seven in 10 Americans oppose data centers near them, most citing environmental strain.

Prudent, but no brakes

Trump left room for caution while ruling out any pause, and told Huang he had guessed they were aligned all along.

“We have to do things and we have to do them prudently, but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry.”