NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during a quarterly earnings call on Wednesday that the US' export control policy on AI chips to China was "clearly wrong," noting that China's AI will move on with or without US chips due to its abundant AI talent.
Huang stated that China is one of the world's largest AI markets and a springboard to global success. "With half of the world's AI researchers based there, the platform that wins China is positioned to lead globally," he said.
When discussing the US' export control on AI chips to China, Huang said that shielding Chinese chipmakers from US competition only strengthens them abroad and weakens America's position, and export controls have spurred China's innovation and scale.
"The US has based its policy on the assumption that China cannot make AI chips. That assumption was always questionable, and now it's clearly wrong," he said, noting that export controls should strengthen US platforms, not drive half of the world's AI talent to rivals.
The US chip-maker reported $44.1 billion in revenue for the first quarter ended on April 27, 2025, up 69 percent year-on-year. However, Huang mentioned in the calls that $50 billion Chinese market is effectively closed to the US industry, with the export ban ending their Hopper data center operations in China.
On April 9, 2025, NVIDIA was informed by the US government that a license is required for exports of its H20 products into the Chinese market, which incurred a $4.5 billion charge during the reporting quarter associated with H20 excess inventory and purchase obligations as the demand for H20 diminished. The financial report indicated that, absent the export restriction, NVIDIA could have recorded an additional $2.5 billion in sales.
In response to a Global Times' inquiryabout what specific conditions and requirements must be met to comply with US government export restrictions if NVIDIA still plans to sell H20 chip to Chinese market, the company said that the H20 ban ended their Hopper datacenter series line in China — we are not able to change the Hopper design to sell to China.
"With the ban on H20, our competitors in China are now largely shielded from US competition and free to leverage that entire $50 billion market to build a robust AI ecosystem," said a spokesperson from the company on May 19.
The US chipmaker is to build a research and development center in Shanghai that would help it stay competitive in China, where its sales have slumped due to tightening US export controls, the Financial Times reported on May 16.
In response, the company told the Global Times via emailon May 20 that "we are leasing a new space for existing employees and this is a continuation of our longstanding presence there," claiming that the company is not sending any GPU designs or core IP to China to be modified to comply with export controls.
