AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying
Tech titan Jensen Huang slammed US rules on chip exports to China, which have hit Nvidia’s business hard.
In a session with reporters and industry analysts at the Computex Taipei tech conference in Taiwan on Wednesday, Huang said the chipmaker’s market share in China has decreased to 50%, down from 95% four years ago.
Huang also said Chinese tech companies have benefited from the crackdown.
“The export control gave them the spirit, the energy, and the government support to accelerate their development. So I think, all in all, the export control is a failure,” he said.
The US started taking steps to limit China’s use of high-tech chips in 2022. Huang’s comments on Wednesday mark an escalation from his previous messaging about the US’s controls.
In February, Huang told CNBC, “It’s hard to tell whether export control is effective.”
In April, Nvidia said the Trump administration tightened rules that effectively banned the sale of the kinds of chips — H20 — Nvidia had created to comply with the Biden administration’s export controls. The company said it expected a $5.5 billion charge in first-quarter earnings due to the new restrictions.
About 13% of Nvidia’s revenue in the year ending in January came from China and Hong Kong, down from 17% the year before.
“China is where 50% of the world’s AI researchers are, and we want AI researchers to build on Nvidia. DeepSeek was built on Nvidia. That’s a gift to us, that’s a gift to the world,” Huang said.
On Wednesday, Huang repeated past compliments for DeepSeek, the AI startup that took global financial markets by surprise in January with a competitive new model, and for tech giant Huawei. He again called the latter, which builds its own chips, “formidable.”
“Our competition in China is really intense,” Huang said. The CEO also said the US has no monopoly on AI development.
“Power is quite cost-effective in China, and there’s plenty of land. So the ban on H20 is not effective,” he said.
Huang added that there was no way to further “degrade” the company’s current graphics processing unit architecture such that buyers would want it.
Bouts of broad market and tech sell-offs and angst about export controls, among other issues, have depressed investor darling Nvidia’s stock recently. The company’s shares are up nearly 41% in the past year but flat this year to date.
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