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Global tour by CEO highlights how leaders from U.S. to China covet his chips

Key Points

TAIPEI—The American president called him “my friend,” Saudi Arabia bought hundreds of thousands of his chips and, in the land of his birth, he was hailed as “the leader of team Taiwan.”

With a visit to Taipei this week, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang capped a whirlwind month of travel that marked him as not just a business tycoon, but one of the world’s most powerful geopolitical forces.

Everyone wants a piece of the charismatic CEO and his coveted chips, seen as the gold standard for advanced artificial-intelligence computing. Investors celebrated his global coming-out party by pushing Nvidia shares up 40% over the past month. The stock’s swoon in January is a distant memory and the company, with a market capitalization of $3.3 trillion, is again within striking distance of global No. 1.

But international fame carries risks too—Huang does business in sensitive regions such as China and the Persian Gulf states.

“His fortune and misfortune is that he created the most valuable technological input of the decade,” said Barath Harithas, a senior fellow at Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The danger is that his visibility becomes a liability. He could end up the fall guy if things unravel in the Gulf, and then face political heat for any perceived overreach in China.”

Huang’s processors and investment spending have the power to change countries’ fates, and the 62-year-old billionaire has himself been changed by his power. He has donned a business suit and tie for meetings with world leaders, shedding his customary leather jacket, and added praise for politicians to his salesman’s patter about tokens and terabytes.

“Without the president’s leadership, his policies, his support and, very importantly, his strong encouragement,” Huang said while standing beside President Trump at the White House on April 30, “frankly, manufacturing in the United States wouldn’t have accelerated to this pace.”

Trump returned the favor two weeks later by giving a shout out to the CEO in a speech in Saudi Arabia. “I see my friend is here, Jensen, that’s very good,” Trump said. “He’s putting in $500 billion,” the president went on, referring to Nvidia’s commitment to build AI supercomputers in the U.S.

Since mid-April, Huang has been flying across the world, unveiling new investments and striking deals. In the Middle East last week, Huang met Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and agreed to sell Nvidia’s powerful AI processors to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

In Taiwan this week, the location of Nvidia’s most important suppliers, Huang drew loud cheers and praise from the island’s president when he announced on Monday the construction of a new Nvidia office building and plans for Taiwan’s first AI supercomputer.

Crowds and rock star-like excitement followed his every step. Huang, a U.S. citizen, was born on the island before moving to the U.S. as a child.

When Huang was due to turn up at an Nvidia partner’s booth at an industry conference on Tuesday, hordes of fans started to gather at the venue as early as an hour ahead. As he walked toward the booth, fans began pressing against the barricades, calling out “Jensen, I love you!” and reaching out to touch the executive.

In a speech, Young Liu, chairman of Taiwan-based contract manufacturer Foxconn, called Huang “the leader of team Taiwan” for his efforts to build up Taiwan’s AI industry.

In return, Huang called Taiwan the “epicenter of the world’s computing industry.”

Huang has pulled off the feat of staying friends with both the U.S. and China, despite tensions between the two superpowers.

In early April, he attended a $1 million-a-head dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and afterward some inside Nvidia were confident the company could keep selling its H20 chips in China, which had been tailored to comply with earlier U.S. regulations. Instead, the U.S. said a few days later it would restrict the sale of the H20 chips, which led Nvidia to take a $5.5 billion charge in the first quarter.

Within days of the new rule, Huang flew to Beijing and publicly reassured senior Chinese officials the company would “unwaveringly serve” the market there. Later, he met the mayor of Shanghai and left with the city’s blessing to open a new research and development center there.

Huang has repeatedly said China will be a powerhouse in global AI development and it would be folly for Nvidia to neglect the market. Each time new U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors have been introduced, Nvidia has adapted by downgrading its chips’ specs to continue selling to Chinese customers.

Lian Jye Su, an analyst at Omdia covering AI, said Nvidia was trying to avoid picking sides between the U.S. and China.

“Nvidia doesn’t have the luxury of staying neutral, and can only try its best to minimize the political fallout,” Su added.

Last week, the Commerce Department put out guidance against the use of American AI chips to train Chinese models and warned against the diversion of such silicon to China.

Harithas of CSIS said the perception of an American executive courting China ran against sentiment in Washington. “If he leans too far toward China with even a neutered chip variant, he risks crossing a red line, triggering public rebuke, or worse, legal blowback,” he said.

The fair will run in February 2026 and cements the Middle East as the next frontier in the global art market

Art Basel will launch a new art fair in Doha, Qatar next year, a move that cements the Middle East as the next frontier in the global art market. “The Middle East and north Africa region is an incredibly important part of the world that in art market terms is relatively underserved,” says Noah Horowitz, chief executive of Art Basel. He says the new fair, to be known as Art Basel Qatar, will be “a breath of fresh air” in “a period of [art market] recalibration”.

The latest Art Basel & UBS Art Market report found that global art sales fell 12 per cent to $57.5bn in 2024, with the Middle East accounting for less than 1 per cent of total turnover. In February, Sotheby’s hosted its first auction in the region, in Saudi Arabia, which made a total $17.3mn (including fees). Internationally focused fairs currently run in Dubai and Abu Dhabi but Art Basel is the first big-brand name to commit to the scene.

Art Basel Qatar will run in February 2026 and is a three-way partnership between Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, with QC+, the commercial arm of Qatar Museums, and Qatar Sports Investments, whose holdings include the French football team Paris Saint-Germain. It is the first time that Art Basel has struck what Horowitz describes as a “multi-dimensional partnership” for one of its fairs, though the financial terms of the collaboration have not been revealed. Art Basel Qatar will be in Doha’s M7, a high-spec cultural hub in the Msheireb district. The fair’s first edition will be small, with about 50 exhibitors, Horowitz says — about a quarter of the size of the smallest fair it currently runs, in Paris. “We are building long-term and gradually.”

Behind it all is Sheikha al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, chair of Qatar Museums and sister of the ruling emir of Qatar. She describes herself as a “cultural partner” to Art Basel Qatar and tells the FT that “this isn’t the first time that an art fair has come to us, but I didn’t feel the time was right until now.” She explains: “We have spent 20 years investing in the software, by which I mean human development, and the hardware, that is building museums. Now we can take our talent, our creatives in the Arab world, to the industry. And Art Basel is the most important platform in the world.” Sheikha Mayassa is also behind Qatar’s first and permanent national pavilion for the Venice Biennale, designed by the Lebanese-born architect Lina Ghotmeh.

Concerns remain over Qatar’s human rights record, notably its treatment of migrant workers, which Amnesty International found were not properly remedied during the 2022 football World Cup, and women, girls and the LGBT+ community. Under the guardianship system, women still need permission to marry and access reproductive healthcare, among other restrictions, while individuals have been detained for their sexual orientation or gender expression. Horowitz says that “there is a very stringent MCH code of conduct that we stand behind and will apply locally, we are absolutely committed to that.”

Art Basel is one of the oldest art fairs on the circuit, founded by three Swiss art dealers in 1970, which now runs events in Miami, Hong Kong and Paris as well as its founding city. Since 2020, its anchor shareholder has been Lupa Systems — the investment vehicle run by James Murdoch — which owns a 42 per cent stake in MCH Group, while the Canton of Basel-Stadt has a 37.5 per cent holding. 

It is a time of shake-up among the biggest-brand commercial art events. Earlier this month, the Hollywood powerbroker Ari Emanuel revealed that he is buying the Frieze global art fair and publishing group from Endeavor, the entertainment group he co-founded, in a deal valued at nearly $200mn.

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