U.S. efforts to curtail China’s access to advanced artificial intelligence chips have backfired, Nvidia (NVDA-1.54%) CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday, adding that the Biden administration’s export restrictions didn’t slow China’s AI ambitions — they accelerated them.
Speaking to reporters at the Computex tech conference in Taipei, Huang said years of U.S. restrictions on AI chip exports were a strategic misfire that cost Nvidia billions and handed Chinese rivals a powerful incentive to innovate.
“All in all, the export control was a failure,” Huang said. “The local companies are very talented and very determined, and the export controls gave them the spirit, the energy, and the government support to accelerate their development.”
Nvidia, which was once dominant in China with a market share approaching 95% at the start of the Biden administration, now holds just 50%, Huang said. The company has been forced to write off “billions of dollars” in revenue after repeated rounds of U.S. export controls blocked sales of its most advanced chips — even models designed to comply with restrictions.
Huang endorsed President Donald Trump’s recent rescinding of the Biden administration’s AI diffusion rule, which would have imposed country-based limits on chip exports — most notably China, due to national security concerns.
“President Trump realizes that it’s exactly the wrong goal,” Huang said. “If the United States wants to stay in the lead, and if we would like the rest of the world to build on American technology, then we have to maximize AI diffusion, maximize the speed.”
The Trump administration has paved the way for a series of multibillion-dollar chip sales agreements across the Gulf region, which one analyst said was a “watershed moment” for Big Tech. Huang accompanied Trump to the Middle East earlier this month, where Nvidia inked deals to supply its top-tier GPUs to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
Huang made it clear, however, that Nvidia still sees China as too important to ignore. Last month, he visited Beijing and met with top Beijing officials and the founder of AI firm DeepSeek to discuss chips that could avoid triggering U.S. sanctions, according to The Financial Times.
“China has a vibrant technology ecosystem, and it’s very important to realize that China has 50% of the world’s AI researchers, and China is incredibly good at software,” Huang said. “AI researchers are still doing AI research in China. If they don’t have enough Nvidia, they will use their own.”
And that’s already happening.
Chinese chipmaker Huawei’s domestically produced Ascend chips (which remain less capable than Nvidia’s) are being installed in data centers under state guidance. Washington recently warned that companies using Huawei chips could face penalties under U.S. law, sparking fierce pushback from Beijing and a warning that enforcement of such measures could violate Chinese law — potentially putting a halt to the progress the two countries have made recently in trade talks.
For now, Nvidia is navigating a geopolitical minefield. It hasn’t gotten everything it wanted from Trump — the company recently took a $5.5 billion hit related to U.S. limits on Nvidia’s H20 chips to China. But Huang’s perspective is clear: Isolating China hasn’t worked, and only a pragmatic, globally inclusive strategy will keep the U.S. — and companies such as Nvidia — at the front of the AI race.
“America is not the only provider of AI technology,” Huang said.
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