Nvidia's Jensen Huang says China is going to win the AI race: Report

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the United States in the artificial intelligence race, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday.

“China is going to win the AI race,” Huang told the newspaper on the sidelines of the Financial Times’ Future of AI Summit.

“As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement posted on X late on Wednesday.

“It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide,” he added.

The artificial intelligence chip leader’s chief in October said that the U.S. can win the AI battle if the world, including China’s massive developer base, runs on Nvidia systems. He, however, lamented that the Chinese government has shut it out of its market.

China’s access to advanced AI chips, particularly those produced by Nvidia — the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation — remains a flashpoint in its tech rivalry with the United States, as both nations vie for supremacy in cutting-edge computing and artificial intelligence.

“We want America to win this AI race. No doubt about that,” Huang said in the Nvidia developers’ conference held in Washington last month.

“We want the world to be built on American tech stack. Absolutely the case. But we also need to be in China to win their developers. A policy that causes America to lose half of the world’s AI developers is not beneficial in the long term, it hurts us more,” he added.

U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview aired on Sunday that Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell chips should be reserved exclusively for American customers.

Nvidia has not applied for U.S. export licenses to sell the chips in China, citing Beijing’s stance toward the company, CEO Jensen Huang previously said. Trump added that Washington would allow China to engage with Nvidia, but “not in terms of the most advanced” semiconductors.