Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Warns China Will Win AI Race Against US

Nvidia's Jensen Huang says China 'will win' AI race with US

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the artificial intelligence race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. In the starkest comments yet from the head of the world's most valuable company, Huang told the FT: "China is going to win the AI race." Huang's remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban on California-based Nvidia selling its most advanced chips to Beijing following a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week. The Nvidia chief said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by "cynicism". "We need more optimism," Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Financial Times' Future of AI Summit. Huang singled out new rules on AI by US states that could result in "50 new regulations". He contrasted that approach with Chinese energy subsidies that made it more affordable for local tech companies to run Chinese alternatives to Nvidia's AI chips. "Power is free," he said. The FT reported this week that China has boosted energy subsidies for several large data centres run by Chinese tech giants including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent. Local governments have beefed up power incentives after Chinese tech groups complained to regulators about the increased costs of using domestic semiconductors from companies such as Huawei and Cambricon, people familiar with the matter said. Most such systems are less energy-efficient than those made by Nvidia. Huang has previously warned that the latest American AI models were not far ahead of their Chinese rivals, urging the US government to open up the market to its chips to keep the rest of the world dependent on its technology. But following his meeting with Xi, Trump said last week that he did not want to let China use Nvidia's cutting-edge Blackwell chips. "The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States," Trump told CBS. "We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced." Nvidia held a developer conference in Washington DC last week, underscoring the chipmaker's efforts to win allies in government. The group's market capitalisation hit $5tn for the first time last week, propelled by Trump's comments that he planned to discuss Blackwell with Xi in South Korea. But their talk did not ultimately cover the topic, the US president later told reporters. Trump had previously suggested Nvidia would regain access to China for a modified version of its latest processors. "It's possible I'd make a deal" on a version of Blackwell that was "enhanced in a negative way", the US president said in August. His comments came after Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15 per cent of Chinese revenues from sales of existing AI processors tailored for the market. The US has not yet adopted the regulations needed to allow such sales. US concern over Chinese progress in AI has been building all year since DeepSeek, a small Chinese AI lab, stunned the world with the sophistication of its large language model. The release of the DeepSeek model in January sparked a frenzied debate in Silicon Valley about whether better resourced US AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, could defend their technical edge.

Nvidia CEO says China on track "to win the AI race"

Huang's warning reflected an apparent frustration with mounting calls for regulation in the U.S. What they're saying: On the sidelines of an FT conference in London Wednesday, Huang said that states in the U.S. were considering new rules that could result in "50 new regulations," while Beijing was subsidizing energy costs to encourage local companies to run Chinese alternatives to his company's chips. * "China is going to win the AI race," he told the FT . State of play: His comments follow the Trump administration's continued ban on sales of Nvidia's most advanced chips to China even after President Trump met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. * Huang has repeatedly emphasized the importance of the Chinese market, not only as a lucrative, $50 billion business opportunity for his company but for the degree of research being done there. * "About 50% of the world's AI researchers are in China," he noted in August. * "The vast majority of the leading open source models are created in China," Huang said then. "And so it's fairly important, I think, for the American technology companies to be able to address that market." Catch up quick: Huang has often referred to the competition over AI with China . * At a tech conference in April, he said that China was "right behind" the U.S. in terms of its AI models, per CNBC. "Remember, this is a long-term, infinite race," he said. * And as recently as Nvidia conference in Washington, D.C., last week, Huang sounded more optimistic, saying: "It is absolutely the case that we can lose this race. But we are well ahead today." At that conference, Huang called for policies to increase energy production and attract AI developers with the goal of the U.S. winning 80% of the global AI market. What we're watching: Whether the Nvidia CEO's warning will prompt the Trump administration to take further steps to promote data center development and stave off state regulatory efforts.

Nvidia's Jensen Huang: 'China is going to win the AI race,' FT reports

(Reuters) -Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the United States in the artificial intelligence race, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. "China is going to win the AI race," Huang told the newspaper on the sidelines of the Financial Times' Future of AI Summit. "As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement posted on X late on Wednesday. "It's vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide," he added. The artificial intelligence chip leader's chief in October said that the U.S. can win the AI battle if the world, including China's massive developer base, runs on Nvidia systems. He, however, lamented that the Chinese government has shut it out of its market. China's access to advanced AI chips, particularly those produced by Nvidia -- the world's most valuable company by market capitalization -- remains a flashpoint in its tech rivalry with the United States, as both nations vie for supremacy in cutting-edge computing and artificial intelligence. "We want America to win this AI race. No doubt about that," Huang said in the Nvidia developers' conference held in Washington last month. "We want the world to be built on American tech stack. Absolutely the case. But we also need to be in China to win their developers. A policy that causes America to lose half of the world's AI developers is not beneficial in the long term, it hurts us more," he added. U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday that Nvidia's most advanced Blackwell chips should be reserved exclusively for American customers. Nvidia has not applied for U.S. export licenses to sell the chips in China, citing Beijing's stance toward the company, CEO Jensen Huang previously said. Trump added that Washington would allow China to engage with Nvidia, but "not in terms of the most advanced" semiconductors. (Reporting by Anusha Shah and Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona)