One honourable exception to the roster of tech billionaires standing behind Donald Trump at the president’s inauguration on January 20th was Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia. He took a quieter approach, instead meeting Mr Trump at the White House just over ten days later. Earlier that week his company, the dominant supplier of artificial-intelligence (AI) chips, had lost $600bn in market value during a sell-off precipitated by the release of the latest AI models from DeepSeek, a Chinese firm. Mr Trump’s plans to respond to the upstart model-maker may have been as much on Mr Huang’s mind as DeepSeek itself.