Nvidia CEO Says US AI Chip Export Controls Failed, Hurt Business

Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, recently spoke at Computex, and he gave a pretty strongly worded statement about the state of AI chips in China. As you could imagine, this statement was both related to tech and politics. Jensen Huang criticized the U.S. export controls brought by the Biden Administration back in 2022.

The situation between China and the US has been pretty turbulent for years. As you know, the U.S. has blocked China from many core technologies over the years. That has not stopped the country from innovating and building up its own infrastructure. This was a key point in Jensen Huang’s rant.

Jensen Huang criticizes the U.S. export controls on AI chips

On Wednesday, Huang said that the export controls of AI chips to China have been a failure. Early in the Biden Administration, the president issued some pretty tight restrictions on advanced AI chips going to China. It also divided all of the countries receiving chips into three tiers. However, current President Donald Trump is walking back this restriction and has since implemented a system based on governmental licenses.

Jensen Huang makes the argument that the US export controls have cost Nvidia a great sum of money. In fact, after this restriction went into place, the company’s revenue dropped to 50%. This is because the company’s ability to sell to China was hindered. Nvidia sells the H20 AI chips to China, and it’s clear that country was a pretty large part of its customer base.

However, after the restrictions went into place, China was left with very few options. It could either suffer or it could boost the productivity of its own AI chips. The country did the latter and really picked up its AI game. As stated by Huang, “The local companies are very, very talented and very determined, and the export control gave them the spirit, the energy and the government support to accelerate their development.” So, China is less dependent on Nvidia chips.

While Jensen Huang is talking about the US export controls in general, we can’t help but to think that he’s mostly angry about losing out on sales. Nvidia is one of the biggest AI companies in the world, so we’re pretty sure that the company isn’t exactly filing for bankruptcy.