Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang walks back his statement that he believes the second-largest economy will come out on top of the AI boom.
In an interview in Taiwan, Huang backtracks on his comment that “China is going to win the AI race,” which triggered a three-day NVDA correction and wiped out about $500 billion of the firm’s market cap.
Huang downplays his statement, noting that he believes China’s pace of AI development is real and that the US must accelerate to stay ahead of the curve.
“That’s not what I said. What I said was China has very good AI technology. They have many AI researchers; in fact, 50% of the world’s AI researchers are in China. And they develop very good AI technology. In fact, the most popular AI models in the world today, open-source models, are from China. So, they are moving very, very fast.”
Less than 24 hours after Huang clarified his statement, the White House reportedly issued a directive to block the sale of Nvidia’s scaled-down B30A AI chip to China. The chip reportedly has the capability to train large language models when deployed in clustered configurations, a capacity Chinese firms are seeking to replicate.
Nvidia confirms the regulatory pressure, telling Reuters it has “zero share in China’s highly competitive market for datacenter compute,” and does not include the region in guidance. The company is modifying the chip’s design in hopes that the US may reconsider, while also facing ongoing compliance scrutiny in China.
Meanwhile, the White House did not respond to requests for comment.
NVDA ended the trading week at $188.15, down over 11% from its all-time high of $212, which it hit in late October.
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