Nvidia has made an important clarification. The company has denied that its CEO Jensen Huang handed over the victory crown to China in AI race. The clarification comes post a report in Financial Times that claimed Huang said, “China is going to win the AI race.” Huang is said to have told the newspaper on the sidelines of the Financial Times’ Future of AI Summit. A statement posted on Nvidia Newsroom, quoting CEO Jensen Huang reads, “As I have long said, China is Nanoseconds behind America in AI. It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.”Huang has often complained about lack of access to the Chinese market. Talking at an event last month, Huang said that the US can win the AI battle if the world, including China’s massive developer base, runs on Nvidia systems. However, the Chinese government has shut Nvidia out of its market. “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.
How America-China calling it peace has not worked for Nvidia
On October 30, the United States and China entered a new trade truce after talks in South Korea between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump agreed to trim tariffs in exchange for Beijing cracking down on illicit fentanyl trade, resuming US soybean purchases and pausing controls on exports of rare earths. Beijing also said that America has pledged a year’s delay in plan to bar Chinese companies from its technology.While Trump-Xi talks brought back US-China trade ties from the brink, it did not help Nvidia much. As just a day later during a taped interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” program, Trump said that Nvidia’s most advanced chips will be reserved for the US companies and kept out of China and other countries. “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” he told CBS, echoing remarks made earlier to reporters as he returned to Washington from a weekend in Florida. “We don’t give (the Blackwell) chip to other people,” he said during the flight.Trump’s startment made it clear that the US may impose tighter restrictions around cutting-edge American AI chips than US officials had previously indicated, with China and potentially the rest of the world barred from accessing the most sophisticated semiconductors.Trump told CBS that he would not allow the sale of the most advanced Blackwells to Chinese companies, but he did not rule out a path for them to obtain a less capable version of the chip. “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced.”
