Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says China ‘will win’ AI race with US

Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the artificial intelligence race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations.

In the starkest comments yet from the head of the world’s most valuable company, Huang told the FT: “China is going to win the AI race.”

Huang’s remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban on California-based Nvidia selling its most advanced chips to Beijing following a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week.

The Nvidia chief 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.

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.

But following his meeting with Xi, Trump said last week that he did not want to let China use Nvidia’s cutting-edge Blackwell chips. “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” Trump told CBS. “We will let them deal with Nvidia but not in terms of the most advanced.”

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

The group’s market capitalisation hit $5tn for the first time last week, propelled by Trump’s comments that he planned to discuss Blackwell with Xi in South Korea. But their talk did not ultimately cover the topic, the US president later told reporters. 

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.