The past few days have not been good for AI’s public image. While the tech has always been controversial, now even the heads of the AI companies who have been boosting it with pie-in-the-sky promises are calling for things to slow down. This has created a problem for the investors keeping the entire thing afloat.
In an attempt to push back against the bad vibes (and protect their stock prices), a panel at the All-In Summit event in Los Angeles turned to Donald Trump, of all people, to reassure everyone that things are fine, the AI is safe, the data centers are “great.”
As reported by CNBC, the president phoned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during an on-stage discussion of Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei’s recent blog post “We Must Pace the Frontier” at the recent All-In Summit.
For context, Amodei called for tighter regulations on AI, limits “on the rate of unchecked AI progress,” and a ban on selling “powerful AI chips or semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.” Surprisingly, Amodei’s essay was endorsed by both Elon Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
“I’m on stage with the besties,” Huang, who oversees a company with a $5.1 trillion market cap, sycophantically told Trump after being handed a phone during the episode. “I’m sitting in front of a few thousand people, and, as it turns out, we were talking about you…Good job, sir, good job—and the fact that you saw through all of that—I mean, there’s a lot of complexity, and the fact of the matter is you saw through all of that, and we’re all just really grateful.”
Huang was then provided with a microphone, which he held to the phone as Trump addressed the crowd:
“So, the AI… it’s almost a conspiracy, and the happiest group is China, and China is very happy,” stated Trump. “And I’m telling you, it’s all a hoax. The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it’s the oil of the next 20, 25 years.”
“It’s bigger than the internet, and the AI, you know, much more so,” he continued. “And, uh, they’re just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen. And, that could be political people—it could also be China. And we’re not gonna let that happen. It’s a, uhh…It’s a hoax.”
It was a transparently shameless and embarrassing stunt—Huang telling Trump he’s done a “good job,” the four hosts of the All-In podcast bending over backward to laugh at his jokes, and Trump proudly proclaiming that AI data centers “make people wealthy”—but what is all in service of?
There’s one possible explanation, which boils down to money. Roughly $31.6 trillion has been invested in building AI data centers. Thanks to public financial disclosures, we know Donald Trump personally invested over $6 million to help build them in 2026 alone.
And, of course, there’s Jensen Huang himself. The more advanced AI becomes, the more chips data centers will need from Nvidia to provide “compute,” the new financial buzzword that means both the hardware resources powering AI and an asset whose value is expected to keep going up.
As AI becomes more advanced, it will require higher compute. The higher the compute, the more money Nvidia makes by supplying GPUs. A slowdown in the inexorable march toward the creation of our new AI overlords could mean not just lower profits in the short term, but potentially the entire debt-backed data center house of cards imploding.
The timing of it all is also extremely suspect. Dario Amodei’s essay went live on Saturday. The podcast at the All-In Summit was filmed on Monday. In the past five days, Nvidia’s stock has dipped by 5.6 percent. In fact, the stocks of the three largest RAM suppliers have all dipped since Amodei’s essay hit the headlines.
Gee, I wonder what the correlation might be here?