Nvidia's CEO Enjoys Noodles in Beijing

Huang tucking into a big bowl of zhajiangmian in Beijing

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang got a big boost in popularity after he was seen eating street food in Beijing during US President Donald Trump's visit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

There are numerous video clips and pictures of Huang in Nanluoguxiang, a street that has some hutongs converted into shops. 

The noodles are served with various toppings 

The Taiwanese-American billionaire held a large bowl of zhajiangmian or "fried sauce noodles", where wheat noodles are topped with ingredients like thinly sliced cucumbers, radish, carrots, or minced pork, and mixed with a fermented soy bean sauce.

"It's so good," he said, taking a bite. 

However, Huang did not like douzhi'er, a fermented mung bean drink that tastes a bit sour and gray-green in colour. It's a traditional Beijing beverage, but not for everyone.

He instead bought a sweet drink from beverage chain Mixue Bingcheng.

Trump brought Huang along at the last minute in the hopes of getting big deals from Beijing, with the Commerce Department clearing 10 Chinese firms to purchase Nvidia's second-most powerful AI chip called the H200.

Musk's son with his viral tiger bag

But in the end China did not allow companies like Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance to buy the chips, and so Nvidia came away empty-handed, and the market reacted with the stock dropping 4.4 percent on Friday.

Did Huang know this would happen and that's why he thought he'd make the most of the trip by eating street food? Possibly. Or was he in a popularity contest with Elon Musk -- who brought his six-year-old son, whose hand-stitched tiger head-shaped bag went viral...

What billionaires have to do to be popular...

China's DeepSeek Shocks American AI Firms

DeepSeek rivals ChatGPT and Gemini in its AI capabilities

Today the biggest business news was Nvidia's stock going free fall because of a little known Chinese artificial intelligence start-up called DeepSeek.

Investors dumped Nvidia's stock when they found out DeepSeek had similar capabilities to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini -- but by using a fraction of the microchips, which means much cheaper and faster than US AI firms. Typically top companies train their supercomputers to use some 16,000 microchips or more; DeepSeek claims it only needed about 2,000.

Nvidia's stock plunged today on DeepSeek news

That sent alarm bells ringing. Loudly.

The Biden administration had limited the number of microchips China could buy in a bid to keep American companies in the lead when it comes to developing AI technology. But with its back against the wall, China's top programmers figured out a way to get more out of each microchip.

There are claims DeepSeek only spent about US$6 million on developing its AI technology, but skeptics think the amount is higher. 

Nevertheless, the inability of the Chinese to get their hands on more microchips is hindering its high tech development, as DeepSeek founder and entrepreneur, Liang Wenfeng told Chinese Premier Li Qiang last week that access to advanced chips was a bottleneck.

While US investors recover from their shock, rival programmers will be going through DeepSeek, as all of its work is open sourced, which means its coding is available for use, or to scrutinise as proof of what they have done.

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng

In the meantime, US tech giants may be asking President Donald Trump for more controls on China. Today he said it was a "wake-up call" for the American tech industry.

Not only was DeepSeek on everyone's lips, but phones as well, as it was the most downloaded app in the last few days at over 1.6 million.