Nvidia CEO: Don't 'Concede' Chinese AI Chip Market
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was critical last week of U.S. policies that he said are restricting the company from selling its advanced chips in China and pushed back on claims that Nvidia AI processors are being smuggled into the country.
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Speaking during an event in Washington hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Huang said U.S. export controls are effectively causing his company and other American firms to “concede” the Chinese advanced chip market, which he called the second-largest such market in the world.
"We can't concede the market," he said.
He noted that not only has the U.S. blocked Nvidia from selling its most advanced chips in the country, but Beijing also ordered its firms to stop buying certain Nvidia products, including its H20 chips (see 2510240038).
“I think we're the first company in history that has been banned on both sides,” he said. “So whoever banned us from going to China, they and China agree.”
Huang dismissed the argument that Nvidia can simply sell its chips elsewhere, saying the company won’t be able to replace the sales it would have made to China. He also disagreed with the claim that export controls are setting back China’s AI industry more than Nvidia being allowed to export its chips to the country.
“That absolutely has not happened,” he said. “As a result, their semiconductor industry has doubled, doubled, doubled.”
Some technology policy experts and analysts have said that allowing sales of high-end U.S. chips to Beijing could allow China to more quickly surpass American companies in the AI race (see 2511200008 and 2509040023).
Huang argued that American technology leadership -- including allowing American firms to export their technology around the globe -- and American national security go “hand in hand.”
“The fact that we have our technology all over the world -- that the world relies on [it] to build their industries, their ecosystem, their economies -- is an advantage for the United States,” he said. “It's a strength of the United States. It helps keep the United States safe when everybody works with us.”
But he also suggested that there are some technologies the U.S. shouldn’t share, especially with adversaries. “We should, of course … safeguard our national security” to “ensure that adversaries don't have access to sensitive technology or advanced technology that we don't need them to have access to,” he said. But after addressing those technologies, “we should also proliferate American technology standards [and] compete around the world.”
In addition, Huang questioned reports that say advanced Nvidia graphics processing units have been smuggled into China. Smugglers would have to move enough GPUs “to fill a football field full of these things” to run an AI data center, he said.
“A GPU for AI centers, AI data centers -- that GPU weighs two tons. It has one and a half million parts. It consumes 200,000 watts. It costs 3 million dollars,” he said. “Every so often somebody says these GPUs are being smuggled. I really would love to see it.”