Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market.
Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race.
The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race.
Photo: Bloomber
Huang yesterday said he merely intended to point out China’s prowess with the fledgling technology.
Huang is continuing to tour the world after making stops in Washington and South Korea last week, while striking deals across industries with companies looking to tap Nvidia’s artificial intelligence hardware expertise. Huang has been followed by persistent speculation that the US would permit sales of Blackwell — Nvidia’s leading-edge AI chip line — in China.
“There are no active discussions. Currently, we’re not planning to ship anything to China,” Huang said. “It’s up to China when they would like Nvidia products to go back to serve the Chinese market. I look forward to them changing their policy, and hopefully we’ll be able to serve the Chinese market again.”
Huang said he was in Tainan to visit TSMC.
“Business is very strong. So I came back to encourage my TSMC friends,” he said.
Huang is encouraging global adoption of AI to expand the use of Nvidia’s technology across regions and industries. Huang is trying to alleviate concerns of an AI bubble and prove that trillions of dollars in hardware investments — such as data centers and Nvidia chips — would pay off.
Nvidia remains barred from selling AI chips that would be financially lucrative in China. A US-China trade accord unveiled last week did not include sales of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips to Chinese customers, and officials in the administration of US President Donald Trump have indicated such a move is off the table for now. If Nvidia were allowed to ship more-capable products to China, it would be able to take advantage of a US$50 billion opportunity there, Huang said in August.
Demand for AI systems in China means that market is set to grow at 50 percent per year, he said.
The China setback has fed into concerns among some Wall Street investors about the sustainability of extraordinary spending on AI. They fear that AI risks falling short on its promise of generating new streams of revenue that can justify hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures on data centers and the Nvidia chips that run them.
Huang yesterday also said that he remains upbeat about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) despite recent concerns over a potential market bubble.
Huang, who arrived in Tainan on Friday for his fourth trip to Taiwan this year, highlighted the strong demand and real-world applications of AI technology when asked to compare the current boom with the internet frenzy of the late 1990s.
"This time is very different because during the dot-com most of the fiber in the ground was dark, but this time all of the GPUs in the cloud [are] being used, and so the demand is very, very strong," Huang told reporters.
"Of course, AI technology is now so effective. The demand is very high because the technology is very compute-intensive. The computing demand is very high, so we are trying to catch up [with] very strong demand," he added, in response to growing global concern about a possible overvaluation of the AI industry.
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