Nvidia CEO: China ‘Will Win’ AI Race with Us

The FT reported this week that China has boosted energy subsidies for several large data centres run by Chinese tech giants including ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent.

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

Huang has previously warned that the latest American AI models were not far ahead of their Chinese rivals, urging the US government to open up the market to its chips to keep the rest of the world dependent on its technology.

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

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

“It’s possible I’d make a deal” on a version of Blackwell that was “enhanced in a negative way”, the US president said in August.

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

The US has not yet adopted the regulations needed to allow such sales.

US concern over Chinese progress in AI has been building all year since DeepSeek, a small Chinese AI lab, stunned the world with the sophistication of its large language model.

The release of the DeepSeek model in January sparked a frenzied debate in Silicon Valley about whether better resourced US AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, could defend their technical edge.