Nvidia's chief promised Trump that artificial intelligence will not slow down: seven in ten Americans do not want a data centre in their neighbourhood

Monday morning in Los Angeles, and on stage sits the man whose company makes the chips without which no artificial intelligence model would switch on. A phone rings. On the other end is Donald Trump. The audience laughs as Jensen Huang, chief of Nvidia, struggles to put the call on speaker - and Trump comments on it live: "The greatest thing in life is that Jensen can make the most complex computer chip in the world... but he cannot figure out how to put you on speaker."

The joke passed in a few seconds. What came after it is politics.

The topic was simple: should the development of artificial intelligence be slowed down. The question is not academic. Dario Amodei, chief of Anthropic, recently published a piece titled "We Must Pace the Frontier", calling for a slowdown in the rate at which model capabilities improve. Huang's answer to the president was one sentence long: "You are right. We are not going to let that happen, sir."

Note who is saying it and to whom. The man whose business depends literally on every next generation of models demanding more chips is promising the president there will be no slowdown. That is not a technological assessment. It is a business interest spoken out loud in front of cameras, and nobody in the room called it that.

The number nobody on stage mentioned as a problem

There is one measure that breaks the picture of popular support. According to a Gallup survey, seven in ten Americans oppose building a data centre in their area. More than half of them cite the consumption of natural resources as the reason, and around a fifth fear a rising cost of living and a deterioration in the conditions they live in. That is not a marginal group. That is a majority in the country building this industry.

Trump has his own explanation for that resistance. According to him, "political people" could be behind it, and perhaps China too - and he called the whole story a hoax. So seventy percent of his own citizens are either organised opposition or foreign influence. Neither of the two men on stage offered a third possibility: that people simply look at what is being built next to them and work out who pays the electricity bill.

Huang was not speaking to a random audience. The hosts of the event are the presenters of the All-In podcast - investors Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Friedberg and David Sacks, who is also an adviser at the White House. A room full of people with money in the same industry, a president on the phone and the chipmaker on stage. It is hard to imagine a more favourable setting for a promise.

Why this is not only an American argument

Data centres are not an abstraction. They are facilities consuming electricity and water in specific places on specific grids, and in Europe the same debate is already under way - from Ireland, where the grid operator introduced restrictions on new connections in Dublin, to the discussions in the Netherlands and Germany. When the big players look for a site for the next phase, the criteria are simple: where electricity is cheaper, permits faster and resistance smaller.

The Balkans have all three. The question is not whether somebody will notice, but on what terms. When an industry publicly promises it will not slow down while a majority of citizens in its home country do not want it in their neighbourhood - where do you think it will go to build?