TL;DRJensen Huang told shareholders national security comes first and that data centres built with smuggled Nvidia chips cannot function without support.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told shareholders on Wednesday that if a commercial opportunity conflicts with US national security, the company would prioritise American interests. “National security comes first,” Huang said in a session shortly after the company’s annual stockholder meeting concluded.
Huang addressed the chip smuggling problem directly, arguing that anyone trying to build AI data centres with diverted Nvidia hardware would fail. “Advanced AI data centres are massive integrated systems that require trusted hardware, software, networking, and continuing support,” he said. He described the prospect of assembling data centres from smuggled products as a dead end.
The message was pointed. If a company wanted to smuggle Nvidia chips or systems into countries with export restrictions, such as China, Huang said they would face challenges getting the hardware working because Nvidia would not provide support or repairs. Without that ongoing relationship, he argued, the systems cannot operate at the scale modern AI demands.
The remarks arrive against a backdrop of escalating enforcement. Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw was charged in March with conspiring to smuggle roughly two and a half billion dollars in Nvidia-equipped servers to China through a front company in Southeast Asia, using heat guns to swap serial numbers and staging dummy servers to fool auditors. Liaw has pleaded not guilty, and the case is set for trial in November.
