"The Trump Administration had no involvement in this partnership": Nvidia denies President role in Intel deal
Huang insists politics played no part in the $5 billion agreement, though Washington is “supportive.”
A few hours after announcing the historic deal in which Nvidia will invest $5 billion in Intel, the companies’ CEOs, Jensen Huang and Lip-Bu Tan, held a joint press conference. The two appeared on Zoom from their respective locations, each struggling to project excitement. Although Intel’s stock was the one soaring on the news, Huang was clearly the star of the event. Most questions were directed at him, and those that weren’t, he answered quickly anyway.
As part of the agreement, Nvidia and Intel will jointly develop chips for data centers and personal computers. “The cooperation between the companies is a historic event,” Huang said. But most of the discussion revolved around whether Nvidia’s production would shift to Intel, and what role politics played in shaping the deal. Both executives insisted that the Trump administration and the ongoing chip war with China were not significant factors, stressing that “manufacturing is not what matters right now.”
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Jensen Huang (right) and Lip-Bu Tan.
(Photos: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg, REUTERS/Laure Andrillon)
"Together, our companies will create custom CPUs for data center platforms," Huang said during a press conference on Thursday. "For personal computing, we are going to create new Nvidia chips that integrate and fuse the world's best CPUs and GPUs. The era of accelerated and AI computing has arrived. Intel and Nvidia are partnered to drive it forward."
"Nvidia and Intel are both successful customers of TSMC," Huang said. "They are a world-class foundry and support customers of diverse needs. You can't overstate the magic that is TSMC. But today, our partnership is 100% focused on the custom CPUs we are building for data centers that can connect to the Nvidia AI ecosystem."
"We both still have a lot of respect for TSMC, and we will continue to work with them," said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan. "We will still work on 14a and 18a and see if that can be used at some point in the future."
"This corroboration will build on the core strengths of both companies," Tan said. "This will unleash the new era of x86 innovation. I'm excited about what we can create together. Clearly, this is all about the scale. We can do even more working together ... Right now we are focused on collaboration, and we can talk about the process down the road."
When asked about former President Trump’s possible role behind the scenes, Huang dismissed the suggestion: "The Trump Administration had no involvement in this partnership at all," Huang said. "They would have been supportive, of course. I told (U.S. Commerce) Secretary (Howard) Lutnick today, and he was very excited about two American companies working together.”
