Still, Jensen Huang says his company's technology remains a generation ahead of those developed by Chinese rivals
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said his company's technology remained a generation ahead of those developed by China, but warned that Huawei Technologies was in a position to expand its semiconductor business should US chip export curbs stay in place.
In an interview with US broadcaster CNBC on Thursday, Huang appeared to echo recent published remarks made by Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, who said the Chinese company's Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) processors lagged behind those from the US "by a generation".
Ren, however, added that using methods like "stacking and clustering [on Ascend-powered machines], the computing results are comparable" to the most advanced systems in the world.
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"AI is a parallel problem, so if each one of the computers are not capable ... just add more computers," Huang said in response to a question about Ren's comments. "What he's saying is that in China, [where] they have plenty of energy, they'll just use more chips."
"He was saying that China's technology is good enough for China. If the United States doesn't want to participate in China, Huawei has got China covered," Huang added. "Huawei [also] has got everybody else covered."
The 62-year-old Nvidia CEO's televised comments, made on the sidelines of the annual VivaTech conference in Paris, reflect his concerns about Huawei's growing AI chip capabilities, which he earlier raised during a closed-door meeting last month with the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.
In an interview with CNBC last month, Huang described Huawei's transformation into "one of the most formidable technology companies in the world", following the Chinese firm's progress in recent years with "essential capabilities to advance AI".
Following his keynote at the Computex 2025 trade show in Taipei last month, Huang said in an interview with tech site Stratechery that the US government's latest restrictions on Nvidia's H20 processors - which had been the most advanced chips the firm could sell to China since early 2024 - as "deeply painful", highlighting the substantial costs for his company and the broader impact on the AI ecosystem in the long run.
Huang told CNBC on Thursday that China remains a strategically important market for the US given the deep pool of AI talent in the world's second-largest economy.
"If we want the American technology stack to win around the world, then giving up 50 per cent of the world's AI researchers is not sensible," he said. "When China starts to aggressively diffuse their AI technology ... so long as all the AI developers are in China ... I think China's stack is going to win."
At VivaTech, Nvidia is trying to woo European markets with new partnerships and a pledge to build 20 new AI factories across the continent, as the company's sales in China shrink owing to Washington's tightening export controls.
Earlier this month, a report by digital publication The Information said Nvidia was developing a new China-tailored AI processor that complies with US export regulations and would enable users to link multiple units to create high-performance computing clusters.
Nvidia planned to produce more than 1 million units of its new B30 chip this year, the report said, amid efforts by the company to preserve its market share in China.
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