So much for America first — after three months of touting a future in which US tech rules the world, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang seems to be giving up.
In a new interview the Financial Times, Huang said that “China is going to win the AI race.”
He added that China will defeat the US due to lower energy costs and looser regulations, while the West is paralyzed by “cynicism” — an astonishing admission about the technological capabilities of a country which multiple presidential administrations have taken pains to hinder.
The comment comes a week after Trump’s trade meeting with PRC President Xi Jinping, where Nvidia’s AI chips were supposed to take center stage. Nvidia’s chips were seen as a key asset in the economic competition with China, but the PRC recently stopped importing them in favor of its own home-baked competitors.
Huang and his fellow tech CEOs had previously hoped the US government could arrange to get the People’s Republic hooked on US tech.
“President Trump understands that having the world build AI on American tech stack helps America win the AI race,” Huang told Fox News in August. “And he wants American technology all over the world so that the whole world is built on the American standard, like the US Dollar is the global standard.”
Instead, Trump’s meeting with Xi has largely been seen as a failure, with the famously hawkish FT admitting China now looks like a “peer rival” to the US.
This stems partly from the trade meeting itself — Trump gave up more than Xi, backing down months of tariff threats. But Huang’s comments also highlight China’s rapidly expanding electrical grid, which stands in stark contrast to the sorry state of energy infrastructure in the US.
With that said, the Nvidia CEO’s comments also read like an effort to give Trump a sharp kick in the pants — though the chronically acrimonious Trump is probably just as likely to turn on Huang.
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