Nvidia Chief Takes Concerns About New AI Chip Controls to Congress
During a closed-door meeting with U.S. lawmakers May 1, Nvidia Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang reiterated his opposition to the Bureau of Industry and Security’s recent AI diffusion rule, the company said.
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Huang told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Nvidia will be forced to “retreat from the rest of the world” if the computing chip-related export controls take effect May 15 as scheduled “without significant changes,” according to "opening remarks" the company posted on X. Such a pullback would jeopardize American technological leadership, he warned.
"If U.S. platforms are absent, companies will turn to strategic competitors like [China's] Huawei to fill the gap," Huang said. "That is why leadership on AI depends not just on what we restrict but on what we enable."
When the Biden administration released the restrictions in mid-January, saying they were needed to keep American companies ahead of their Chinese competitors, Nvidia called the rule a “regulatory morass” that would “weaken America’s global competitiveness” (see 2501130026). Other representatives of the computing chip industry, including the Semiconductor Industry Association, have raised similar concerns (see 2504210021), and Jeffrey Kessler, the new head of BIS, has pledged to review the rule (see 2502270041).
Huang’s Capitol Hill comments came a little over two weeks after the House Select Committee on China asked Nvidia whether and how the company’s chips powered the recent development of an advanced AI model by Chinese startup DeepSeek despite U.S. export restrictions (see 2504160039). A committee spokesperson said May 2 that Nvidia’s response to the letter “raised more questions than it answered, and we are continuing to dig into the facts to get to the ground truth.”
During Huang's meeting with House Foreign Affairs, described as a "roundtable on DeepSeek, export controls and the AI arms race," the executive insisted his company fully complies with all U.S. export controls. "We only sell within the conditions set by the U.S. government," he said in his prepared remarks. "And we support effective enforcement and cooperate fully with regulators."