Reports earlier this week suggested that the Trump administration was planning to deploy a wave of federal agents on the streets of San Francisco as part of a large-scale immigration-enforcement plan. The news was met with widespread condemnation and plans to protest from the local community.
Trump has since posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, confirming that a planned ‘surge’ this weekend would no longer go ahead after conversations with San Francisco’s mayor, and others—including Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang (via The San Francisco Standard).
“The Federal Government was preparing to ‘surge’ San Francisco, California, on Saturday, but friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge in that the Mayor, Daniel Lurie, was making substantial progress,” says Trump.
“Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great,” he continued. “They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”
Huang owns a substantial piece of property in the San Francisco area, while Nvidia also looks to be in the process of acquiring more office space in the city over the next few months.
The Nvidia chief also appears to have a genuine fondness for the city, describing it as “thriving” earlier this year in regards to the apparent resurgence of its tech scene.
The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, a philanthropic organisation co-founded and run by Huang and his wife, has also made significant donations in the area—and now it appears that Huang has used his relationship with the president to step in on San Francisco’s behalf.
Huang’s relationship with Trump seems to be a strong one, with the US president calling him a “great guy” earlier this year at the AI summit in Washington DC. And, it must be said, Huang appears to be using that relationship to great effect.
While Nvidia’s efforts to establish its presence in the Chinese AI GPU market have yet to bear fruit amid ongoing tensions between the Trump administration and Beijing, it seems that his influence over the president still holds a substantial amount of weight. As a result, it looks like Trump’s plans to ‘surge’ the San Franciscan streets are on hold—for now, at the very least.
