Jensen Huang is known for many things: leading the world’s most valuable company, his trademark leather jacket, and his love of street food.
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The Nvidia CEO was spotted eating noodles on a Beijing sidewalk on Friday after accompanying President Donald Trump on his state visit to China.
“It’s so good,” Huang told a crowd of onlookers while tucking into the fried bean sauce noodles.
One clip of the moment shared on X racked up more than a million views by early Friday morning.
Huang was part of a delegation of business leaders — including Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Larry Fink — who joined Trump for his meeting with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, this week. Huang was not originally part of the exec group until Air Force One made a last-minute pit stop in Alaska to pick up the Nvidia CEO on Wednesday.
Huang is no stranger to diplomatic visits to China: Nvidia has faced US restrictions on the sale of its advanced AI chips to the country for nearly four years.
He’s also no stranger to sampling street market food during his business travels.
Over the years, Huang has been spotted enjoying local cuisine at markets in cities such as Taipei, Taiwan, and Hanoi, Vietnam.
Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images
As Nvidia’s market cap has soared — it’s currently valued at $5.7 trillion — so too has Huang’s celebrity. That’s led to bigger crowds flocking to see the CEO when he dines out, as demonstrated when his fried chicken meal with the heads of Samsung and Hyundai was crashed by photographers in South Korea last year.
Huang also likes to mix business and food out of the public eye. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, said in 2024 that the Nvidia boss once invited him to his house to cook cheesesteaks.
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Huang is a foodie. The idea for Nvidia famously came from Huang and his cofounders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, over coffee and pancakes at a Denny’s in San Jose, California — something that the company paid homage to with pop-up Denny’s stalls at its GTC conference last year.
Johannes Neudecker/picture alliance via Getty Images
One thing that didn’t seem to be on the menu during Trump’s China state visit was announcements about AI or semiconductors.
Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, said in a Friday interview with Bloomberg that US export controls on semiconductor chips were not a major topic of discussion with Chinese officials in Beijing.
Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported on Thursday that the US had cleared about 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips, but added no sales had yet taken place.
Huang has previously made clear his appetite for the Chinese market, calling it a $50 billion opportunity.
