Nvidia Chief Makes Blunt Prediction on Who Will Win AI Race: Report

(Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via AP)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang offered a blunt prediction that China will beat the U.S. in the “AI race” and that Western countries are being held back by “cynicism.”

As the battle over who will dominate in the development of the consequential technology, Huang, whose $5 trillion California-based company is trapped in regulatory crossfire, argued that China is structurally advantaged and pointed to the country’s radically lower energy costs and permissive regulatory environment.

Speaking to the Financial Times at the Future of AI Summit, he said: “China is going to win the AI race.”

States in the U.S., he warned, are writing a patchwork of tech rules that could mean “50 new regulations.” By contrast, he said, China is already creating subsidies that make AI computing cheap enough to run national alternatives to Nvidia’s chips.

“Power is free,” he said.

His remarks came after President Donald Trump, who met China’s President Xi Jinping in Asia last week, maintained the ban on Nvidia’s most advanced chips being sold to China despite mulling a regulatory pathway that would allow Nvidia to sell modified and weaker versions of its most powerful chips to China.

Huang told the newspaper that Western countries are burdened by their mindset and trapped in “cynicism.”

“We need more optimism,” he said.

The warning comes just weeks after Huang praised Trump’s “AI and energy agenda” at Nvidia’s annual AI conference in October, crediting that policy for a partnership with the Energy Department to build seven new AI supercomputers and revealing that he had contributed to the president’s $300 million White House ballroom project.