Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, met with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba on Monday and told him directly that Japan must start producing more electricity if it wants to keep up with the rising demand of artificial intelligence.
According to Bloomberg, the meeting took place in Tokyo, where Huang explained that AI doesn’t just need chips and software — it needs power.
“The country needs to build new infrastructure,” Jensen said. “Energy is essential for all industrial growth.” He said Japan’s strength in robotics and manufacturing gives it an edge, but that won’t mean anything if the country can’t keep the lights on for the data centers that AI systems rely on.
Nvidia caught between a rock and a hard place
The visit came just 2 days after Jensen returned from Beijing, where he tried to ease tensions following President Donald Trump’s decision to ban the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chip to China. The H20 was built specifically for the Chinese market to comply with previous U.S. export controls.
Trump’s new move blocked it completely. Huang’s schedule has been stacked. Right after dealing with Chinese regulators and a hostile White House, he went straight to Tokyo to push Japan for more energy investment.
Nvidia announced it expects to take a $5.5 billion hit from these new U.S. chip restrictions, a number it dropped in a filing last week. The company’s stock tanked by nearly 7% after the announcement. That wasn’t the only red flag for investors.
Jensen also got hit by new pressure from Congress. A bipartisan House committee asked him to explain how Nvidia’s H800 GPUs ended up in the hands of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company that recently launched a new, powerful large language model. The H800s were originally cleared under earlier U.S. rules but were later added to the banned list.
Committee Chairman John Moolenaar, a Republican from Michigan, and ranking Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois wrote to Huang and said they were concerned Nvidia’s chips might be getting into China through back channels.
“Despite multiple rounds of US export restrictions on AI chips, DeepSeek’s ability to develop cutting-edge AI models suggests that loopholes or indirect channels may still exist,” they wrote. The committee pointed to a recent case in Singapore, where three men were arrested, including a Chinese national, for allegedly falsifying documents to hide the real end-user of Nvidia’s chips.
As of now, both Nvidia and officials in Singapore have denied any illegal activity. The company responded in financial filings that “most shipments associated with Singapore revenue were to locations other than Singapore.” But they didn’t name those locations, and they didn’t deny Chinese firms may have been the ones buying the hardware. The company also didn’t confirm whether DeepSeek got the GPUs through illegal means or through third parties skirting U.S. rules.
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