- Huang argues the West may be undermining itself with internal divisions and regulatory fragmentation
- While China ramps up support for its tech titans, US and UK firms navigate a maze of emerging compliance mandates that risk dampening innovation.
- CEO contends that continued lockouts not only risk ceding the global market to others, but also erode dependency on American technology.
In a dramatic assessment of the global artificial intelligence competition, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has sounded the alarm: China is poised to eclipse the United States in AI advancement, owing to an energy advantage and a more relaxed regulatory climate.
Speaking to the Financial Times at the Future of AI Summit, Huang—whose company now tops the world with a $5 trillion valuation—delivered his most candid prediction yet: “China is going to win the AI race.”
A battle of policy and infrastructure
Huang’s comments come against a backdrop of tightening US export controls that prohibit Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI chips to Chinese buyers. The restrictions, reaffirmed after a high-stakes meeting between President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping, are intended to safeguard American tech leadership.
However, Huang argues the West may be undermining itself with internal divisions and regulatory fragmentation.
“We need more optimism,” he said, criticising the growing patchwork of state-level AI rules in the US, warning these could splinter technology policy with “50 new regulations.”
By comparison, Huang observed that China’s highly coordinated strategy, including generous power subsidies for data centres, is fueling rapid growth in homegrown AI capabilities. “Power is free,” he noted, pointing to China’s ability to make domestic AI compute vastly more affordable—even as local chips from Huawei and Cambricon remain less energy efficient than Nvidia’s.
Regulatory risks
The contrast is stark: while China ramps up support for its tech titans—including ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent—through increased energy subsidies, US and UK firms navigate a maze of emerging compliance mandates that risk dampening innovation.
Huang has previously warned that American AI models are only marginally ahead of those produced by Chinese groups, urging Washington to loosen market restrictions. The CEO contends that continued lockouts not only risk ceding the global market to others, but also erode dependency on American technology.
President Trump, however, remains firm. Last week, he stated, “The most advanced, we will not let anybody have them other than the United States,” signaling a hard line on Nvidia’s state-of-the-art Blackwell chips, though he indicated some willingness to allow “negatively enhanced” versions for the Chinese market.
Amidst the policy standoff, Nvidia is hedging its bets—hosting high-profile events in Washington, opening the door to dialogue with policymakers, and reportedly agreeing (along with AMD) to share 15 per cent of China-based AI chip revenues with the US government if regulation permits. For now, however, rules enabling such sales remain pending.
The sense of urgency in Silicon Valley has only grown since the January debut of DeepSeek, a small but highly sophisticated Chinese AI lab whose language models shook the industry and prompted tough questions about America’s diminishing technical lead.
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