US chip exports controls have been a “failure”, the head of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, told a tech forum on Wednesday, as the Chinese government separately slammed US warnings to other countries against using Chinese tech.
Successive US administrations have imposed restrictions on the sale of hi-tech AI chips to China, in an effort to curb China’s military advancement and protect US dominance of the AI industry. But Huang told the Computex tech forum in Taipei that the controls had instead spurred on Chinese developers.
“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,” Huang told media the Computex tech show in Taipei.
“I think, all in all, the export control was a failure.”
“China has a vibrant technology ecosystem, and it’s very important to realise that China has 50% of the world’s AI researchers, and China is incredibly good at software,” Huang said.
Nvidia, which designs high-end GPUs, has been battered by US chip export controls. Huang said on Wednesday the company had written off “billions of dollars” in sales, and it’s share of China’s AI chip market had fallen from almost 95% at the start of the Biden administration to 50%.
Last month Huang made a surprise visit to Beijing, where he met with the head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, according to Chinese state media, and the DeepSeek founder, Liang Wenfeng, according to the Financial Times.
His visit came just days after further US restrictions banned shipments to China of Nvidia’s H20 datacentre GPUs, a lower-powered version of other Nvidia chips which was designed specifically to comply with Biden-era restrictions.
The US government told Nvidia the new rules were designed to address the risk that its products might be “used in, or diverted to, a supercomputer in China”.
Huang’s Beijing meeting with Liang was to discuss new chip designs for the AI company that would not trigger the new US bans, the FT report said.
Last week the Trump administration rescinded some of the existing controls on chip sales to China, after some countries said they were being shut out from crucial technology needed to develop artificial intelligence.
But it also unveiled fresh guidelines for other countries, warning companies that using Chinese-made hi-tech AI semiconductors, specifically tech company Huawei’s Ascend chips, could put them in breach of existing US export controls.
In response China accused the US of “abusing export controls to suppress and contain China”. The commerce ministry said on Wednesday the warning was “typical unilateral bullying and protectionism, which seriously undermine the stability of the global semiconductor industry chain and supply chain”.
It also warned that “any organisation or individual that enforces or assists in enforcing such measures” could be in violation of Chinese law.
