TAIPEI, Taiwan — The head of American chipmaker Nvidia praised President Donald Trump’s move to modify U.S. curbs on the export of artificial intelligence chips to China, saying Wednesday that the Biden-era controls were a “failure” that had cost his and other U.S. companies billions of dollars in sales.
Under former President Joe Biden, the United States rolled out a three-tiered system of export curbs on advanced chips aimed at regulating the global diffusion of AI, blocking China entirely. While Biden said the curbs were necessary to slow China’s development of technology that could have military applications, critics said they could undermine U.S. tech leadership.
The Trump administration said last week that it plans to rescind some of those curbs and replace them with its own restrictions.
Nvidia’s billionaire chief executive, Jensen Huang, said his company controls 50% of the market in China today, compared with almost 95% at the start of the Biden administration in 2021.
“All in all, the export control was a failure,” he told reporters on the sidelines of Computex, a top technology trade show in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, saying the curbs were based on the “fundamentally flawed” assumption that the U.S. is the only source of AI technology.
Huang, 62, said Chinese companies blocked from buying American products had instead turned to local sources such as Chinese tech giant Huawei, and that they had been spurred to make advances with as little outside help as possible.
“The local companies are very, very talented and very determined,” Huang said, “and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development.”
Those companies “would love for us never to go back to China,” he said, adding that China is home to 50% of the world’s AI researchers and has an AI market he estimated would be worth $50 billion by next year.
Nvidia said last month that it would write off about $5.5 billion in H20 AI chips it had specifically designed for the China market to comply with previous curbs after the Trump administration said those chips would also be restricted.
“I really do hope that the U.S. government recognizes that the ban is not effective and give us a chance to go back and win the market as soon as possible,” Huang said.
Huang, who was with Trump on his Middle East trip last week along with other tech leaders, lauded the president for his “great reversal” of Biden’s policy, known as the AI diffusion rule, saying Trump “realizes it’s exactly the wrong goal.”
“He sees it very clearly that the race is on,” Huang said, “and if the United States wants to stay ahead, we need to maximize, accelerate our diffusion, not limit it, because somebody else is more than happy to provide it.”
China’s state-led investment in chips has probably exceeded $150 billion over the past decade, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Beijing has repeatedly criticized the U.S. over its chip curbs, including guidelines Washington issued last week that said companies anywhere in the world risked violating U.S. export controls if they used advanced Chinese chips such as Huawei’s Ascend without a license.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce said Monday that the U.S. action “seriously undermines” the consensus the U.S. and China reached earlier this month on slashing their tariffs on each other’s goods.
On Wednesday, the ministry further accused the U.S. of “abusing export controls to suppress and contain China.” It pledged to invoke China’s anti-foreign sanctions law against anyone involved in enforcing the U.S. move, slamming it as “a typical example of unilateral bullying and protectionism.”
Mithil Aggarwal reported from Taipei, and Peter Guo reported from Hong Kong.
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