TECH NEWS – Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, says the company’s current position could be undermined under strong competition.
Huawei is emerging as a competitor to Nvidia, which now fears that US export regulations could significantly undermine the company’s market position. As geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China escalate, both nations are engaged in a kind of “AI war,” competing for artificial intelligence models and cutting-edge hardware capabilities. With the U.S. imposing strict export restrictions on Nvidia, Huawei has seen how to capitalize on the opportunity by significantly expanding its AI product offerings. This apparently bothered Nvidia’s CEO, who raised the issue of Huawei’s growing capabilities in a closed-door meeting with the US House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“If DeepSeek R1 had been trained on Huawei chips, or a future Chinese open-source model had been trained to be highly optimized for Huawei chips, it would risk creating a global market demand for Huawei chips,” Huang said, as reported by Reuters. There is no doubt that Huawei and China have significantly increased their AI capabilities under the influence of US policy. A prime example of this is Huawei’s Ascend AI chips, which were able to compete with Nvidia’s Hopper H100 and H20 AI accelerators. The Chinese company has received orders from ByteDance and Tencent, and it looks like this will not stop, as the company plans to release new hardware with even higher performance soon. Nvidia’s position will therefore become more difficult if the competition intensifies at the current rate.
Huawei recently unveiled its first cutting-edge AI cluster, the CloudMatrix 384, which uses the Ascend 910B chip and is comparable in performance to Nvidia’s Blackwell GB200 NVL72. Despite being three times the price, the cluster shows that the generation gap between Huawei and Nvidia has narrowed significantly, something Huang pointed out to US lawmakers.
It’s unclear whether Nvidia will get any loopholes from the Trump administration. The AI proliferation rule could also be a heavy weight around Nvidia’s neck, as it could hinder the company’s presence in global markets. The Trump administration has already banned the export of its H20 AI chip, and this could be just the beginning.
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