Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said that China is in striking distance of taking the lead in the global artificial intelligence race, a week after he stood on a stage near the White House and boasted of his company's plans to help the US dominate.
Mr Huang’s brief statement, posted to Nvidia’s social media accounts, comes after he was unable to convince President Donald Trump's administration to allow Nvidia to sell its powerful Blackwell graphics processing unit clusters to China.
“China is nanoseconds behind America in AI,” his statement read.
“It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers.”
Asked on Tuesday about Nvidia’s hopes for Blackwell chips in China, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed to reporters that it is currently “not something we're interested in selling” to Beijing.
Though it’s not the first time that Mr Huang has warned about China’s ability to compete in the AI space, Nvidia’s social media post comes amid a flurry of headlines that suggest a growing chasm between what the company wants from US legislators and what it is receiving.
In response to Mr Huang’s warning about China, the US House of Representatives select committee on the Chinese Communist Party said in a social media post that “China may be ‘nanoseconds behind’ in AI but for years it was in Nvidia’s backyard”, accusing the company of assisting a “blacklisted” Chinese company.
Nvidia has been vocal in pushing for the US to relax export restrictions related to powerful chips increasingly necessary to build up AI infrastructure.
Through those efforts Mr Huang has been relatively successful in convincing Mr Trump to loosen some restrictions on selling certain chips to China, but concerns within the White House and in Congress remain, causing regulations related to more powerful AI chips to stay in place.
The company has long held the position that export policies designed to help the US protect its AI technology actually hurt its ability to gain influence in countries like China.
The inadvertent side effect of the strict export policies, Nvidia has argued, has prompted China to build up its own AI chip infrastructure.
During Nvidia’s GTC exhibition over the summer, Mr Huang sat next to US Energy Secretary Chris Wright, as both men spoke with reporters about plans for Nvidia to help the US build more supercomputers.
Mr Huang also told reporters that in some ways, even though the US was currently in the lead in AI development, China had several baked-in advantages.
“Fifty per cent of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese,” he said, explaining that in addition to strict US chip export policies, the country’s increasingly cumbersome work visa policies posed problems.
“If you just look at the AI labs here in America and the number of Chinese people that are there, it’s quite significant,” he said.
“It is extremely important that United States continue to be the country by which immigrants like myself want to come here, do our education, build our career and build our life.”
Many technology analysts and executives have pointed out that China’s ability to quickly build power plants without much regulatory oversight could assist with Beijing’s push to dominate AI innovation, with data centres needing more and more electricity to operate.
During his appearance with Mr Huang at GTC, Mr Wright didn’t speak about export controls, but did touch on his vision for going toe to toe with China on providing energy for AI data centres.
“We need to get off the treadmill where he previously had energy subtraction policies, not energy addition policies,” he said. “We for sure will lose the AI race if we don't rapidly grow electric generating capacity in the United States.”
Making matters potentially more urgent for Nividia, Reuters recently reported that Beijing has enacted laws that would prohibit any government-funded AI data centres from using US chips.
That policy bolsters a recent report indicating that China is making strides in semiconductor production despite US export controls.
“Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation is adding capacity in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing for advanced node capacity … they will have nearly 50,000 (microchip) wafers per month of capacity this year,” the capital market firm Jefferies said in its report.
Nvidia has not yet responded to The National’s requests for comment on this article.
