China is producing the world’s best AI models, and there are hard numbers that show why this is the case.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently delivered an assessment of China’s position in the global AI race, offering concrete statistics that underscore the nation’s formidable capabilities. Huang painted a picture of a country that has built a massive, sophisticated AI ecosystem—one that the United States has largely ceded through export restrictions and market withdrawal.
“50% of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese,” Huang stated. “Third, 70% of last year’s AI patents are published by China. The ecosystem of AI in China is vibrant, rich, incredibly innovative. They work incredibly hard. This is a country with an enormous mind. So that is the ecosystem of software developers.”
The NVIDIA chief’s comments take on particular significance given his company’s central role in the AI revolution. NVIDIA’s GPUs have become the backbone of AI development worldwide, making Huang uniquely positioned to observe global trends in artificial intelligence research and development.
Huang went further, addressing the strategic implications of recent U.S. policy toward China’s tech sector: “Now that layer, as I just mentioned, the model and the application layer—all of these scientists, they’re sitting at the model and the application layer, and now they’re going to take that capability because United States is no longer participating in China. We’ve left China, we’ve evacuated that market, we’ve conceded that market, and so now they’ve got to go build their own.”
His warning about what comes next was unambiguous: “So using these AI researchers, all of this incredible computer scientists that they have, their richness of software capability, and they’re going to go build their own complete stack. Once they build that entire complete stack, they’ll export it as quickly as you could imagine.”
The implications of Huang’s analysis are far-reaching. While U.S. export controls on advanced chips were designed to slow China’s AI development, they may have inadvertently accelerated the country’s push toward technological self-sufficiency. China’s recent AI breakthroughs seem to validate Huang’s concerns—models like DeepSeek have demonstrated capabilities that rival Western counterparts, often at a fraction of the computational cost. ByteDance’s continued dominance in AI-powered content recommendation, Alibaba’s Qwen models, and Baidu’s ERNIE platform all point to a thriving ecosystem that’s increasingly less dependent on Western technology.
The “complete stack” Huang references represents everything from chip design to foundational models to consumer applications. If China succeeds in building this vertically integrated ecosystem and begins exporting it globally, it could reshape the technological infrastructure of nations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America—regions where cost-effective AI solutions may prove more attractive than premium Western offerings. For U.S. policymakers and tech leaders, the question is no longer whether China can compete in AI, but whether current strategies are inadvertently creating a parallel technological universe that will ultimately diminish American influence in the most transformative technology of the century.