Santa Clara/Beijing, May 9 (UNI) Amid US’ ongoing trade war with China, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that losing Chinese business will be a "massive loss" for the multi-billion-dollar semiconductor conglomerate, as it continues facing tightening restrictions from Washington for its exports to Beijing.
China’s AI market is likely to grow to US$50 billion in the next two to three years, Huang said in an interview with US broadcaster CNBC on Tuesday. “It would be a tremendous loss not to be able to address it as an American company,” he said, according to the South China Morning Post.
Selling to China would also help bring revenue back to the US, contributing to taxes and helping to “create lots of jobs”, he added. “The world’s dynamic today. You just got to stay agile.”
These remarks come amid the stringent US restrictions on the company’s export of advanced chips such as the A100 and H100 to China, which are crucial for AI applications such as machine learning, supercomputing, and large-scale data processing.
Due to recent developments however, the company was forced to modify its chips to comply with US rules, resulting in products like the A8000 and H8000 for the Chinese market, which are not as advanced. These versions were less powerful but still suitable for AI applications. China’s biggest tech firms, such as Tencent Holdings and ByteDance, currently use these chips to develop and train their AI models.
However, NVIDIA’s Chinese competitors such as Huawei and Biren are now aggressively developing their own counterparts to NVIDIA chips to reduce reliance on American technology. As China contributes to over 25% of the company’s total revenue, a loss of its markets would result in loss of billions.
Huang has repeatedly stressed the significance of China's AI market, as the company seeks to maintain a presence in the country that contributed roughly 14% of its revenue last financial year, accounting for US$17.1 billion, according to the SCMP.
In an interview with US reporters in Washington last week, Huang said China is “right behind” the US in AI competition.
He also cautioned that Huawei Technologies is becoming “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world”, as the firm has made enormous progress in recent years with “essential capabilities to advance AI”.
As such, he has repeatedly appealed to Washington to change its international AI export restrictions, saying that this could help in not just improving machine-learning, but also create new opportunities for American tech companies to capitalise on.
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