NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has a bird-eye’s view of how AI is progressing in different regions of the world, and he has some bleak news for his home country.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told FT that China “will win” the AI race. “China is going to win the AI race,” Huang said. He added said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by “cynicism”. “We need more optimism,” Huang said on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Financial Times’ Future of AI Summit.
Huang singled out new rules on AI by US states that could result in “50 new regulations”. He contrasted that approach with Chinese energy subsidies that made it more affordable for local tech companies to run Chinese alternatives to Nvidia’s AI chips. “Power is free,” he said.
After his comments were reported, Huang came up with a clarification. “As I have long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI. It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide,” Huang said in a statement via NVIDIA.
This isn’t the first time that Jensen Huang has spoken about China’s advances in AI. In May this year, he’d said that China was “not behind” the US in AI. “They’re very, very close. And so we’re going to compete for a long time,” Huang had then said. “And just remember that (China) is a country with great technical capabilities. Fifty percent of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese. And so this is an industry that we will have to compete for,” he had added.
Huang isn’t the only US executive that has warned about Chinese dominance in AI. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that China will win the AI race “with enormously negative effects” if the US doesn’t get its act together. Marc Andreessen has also said that it’s vital that the US beat China at AI, because he wanted the AI systems of the future to have Western values, not CCP values.
And there are good reasons to believe that China is catching up fast with the US at AI. Just this month, Chinese models surpassed US-made models as the open model of choice for the first time. China has a string of companies making popular open models like Alibaba’s Qwen, DeepSeek, Baidu, Moonshot AI and others, which have amassed millions of users. And with some of the biggest names in US’s tech space saying that China has a good chance of winning the AI race, American companies — and the US government — would do well to realize that they have a serious fight on their hands.