Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says China ‘will win’ AI race with US

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned that China will overtake the United States in the AI ​​race, thanks to lower energy costs and more flexible regulations.

In the strongest comments yet from the head of the world’s most valuable company, Huang told the Financial Times: “China will win the AI ​​race.”

Huang’s comments come after the Trump administration maintained a ban on California-based Nvidia selling its most advanced chips to Beijing following a meeting between US president Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week.

Nvidia’s boss said the West, including the US and UK, was hampered by “cynicism”. “We need more optimism,” Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Future of Artificial Intelligence Summit organized by the Financial Times.

Huang pointed to new rules on artificial intelligence set by US states, which could lead to “50 new regulations.” He contrasted this approach with Chinese energy subsidies that have made it easier for local technology companies to power Chinese alternatives to Nvidia’s AI chips. “Power is free,” he said.

The Financial Times reported this week that China has boosted power subsidies for several large data centers run by Chinese tech giants including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent.

Local governments boosted energy incentives after Chinese technology groups complained to regulators about rising costs of using domestic semiconductors from companies such as Huawei and Cambricon, people familiar with the matter said. Most of these systems are less power efficient than those made by Nvidia.

Huang previously warned that the latest US AI models were not far superior to their Chinese competitors, and urged the US government to open the market for its chips to keep the rest of the world dependent on its technology.

But after his meeting with Xi, Trump said last week that he did not want to allow China to use Nvidia’s advanced Blackwell chips. “The most advanced, we won’t let anyone get it but the United States,” Trump told CBS. “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of more advanced hardware.”

Nvidia held a developer conference in Washington, D.C., last week, underscoring the chipmaker’s efforts to gain allies in government.

The group’s market value reached $5 trillion for the first time last week, driven by Trump’s comments that he intended to discuss the Blackwell case with Xi in South Korea. But their conversation did not address the issue in the end, as the US President later told reporters.

Trump had previously suggested that Nvidia would regain access to China for a modified version of its latest processors.

“I might make a deal” on a version of Blackwell that was “negatively enhanced,” the US president said in August.

His comments came after Nvidia and AMD agreed to pay the US government 15 percent of Chinese revenues from sales of existing AI processors designed specifically for the market.

The United States has not yet adopted the necessary regulations to allow such sales.

US concern about Chinese advances in artificial intelligence has been mounting all year since the small Chinese AI lab DeepSeek stunned the world with the development of its massive language model.

The launch of the DeepSeek model in January sparked a heated debate in Silicon Valley over whether better-resourced US AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, were able to defend their technical superiority.