Nvidia Trying to ‘Best Serve’ Chinese Market Despite US Export Controls, CEO Says
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last week criticized U.S. export controls on advanced chips, saying restrictions against China have so far been a “failure.” He called on the government to allow Nvidia and other chip companies to more freely sell to China, which he said will help the U.S. economy.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
“I think, all in all, the export control was a failure, the facts would suggest it,” Huang told reporters at Computex, an industry event held earlier this month in Taiwan. A transcript of his remarks was published by Tom’s Hardware this week.
Before the Biden administration began imposing its curbs on advanced chips destined to China, Huang said, Nvidia’s market share in China “was nearly 95%.” Now, it’s “only 50%,” he said. “The rest of it is China's technology.” He said the policies caused Nvidia to lose “a lot of revenue, and nothing changed.”
Because of the controls, Nvidia “wrote off … multiple billion dollars of inventory,” he said. Huang called the Chinese market “very important,” partly because the country houses “50% of the world's AI researchers,” and Nvidia wants those researchers to use the company’s chips.
“So, the $50 billion market opportunity to Nvidia is quite significant, and it would be a shame not to be able to enjoy that opportunity, to bring home tax revenues to the United States, create jobs … sustain the industry,” Huang said.
Huang said Nvidia is now trying to think about how it can “best serve” the China market despite the controls. Although the Trump administration announced plans to repeal the Biden-era AI diffusion rule (see 2505210056), which was set to introduce new restrictions on exports of advanced AI chips around the world, Huang said existing U.S. controls are still making selling to China “quite complicated.”
“But anyhow, we're going to do our best,” he said. “I don't have any good ideas at the moment, but I'm going to keep thinking.”
He added that if the U.S.government “would like to completely have sanctions, and whatever they want to ban completely, they're allowed to do that, of course, and we'll comply with the law.” Until then, “our job is to comply with the export controls," Huang said, "and the government is very clear about that, provide the export controls, but do your best. Provide the export controls, but continue to do your best, serve the market.”