Huawei's mounting competition is now bothering NVIDIA, as Jensen fears that US export regulations would significantly undermine Team Green's market position.
NVIDIA's CEO Urges US Lawmakers To "Ease Off" Pressure On The Firm's Chip Exports; Says It Would Give Huawei An Edge
With the US-China geopolitical tensions kicking in, both nations are engaged in what we call the "AI war", where there's a race for AI models and cutting-edge hardware capabilities. With the US implementing harsh export regulations on NVIDIA, Huawei has managed to figure out a way to capitalize on the opportunity by significantly ramping up its AI product offerings, and this has apparently bothered NVIDIA's CEO, who has raised Huawei's growing capabilities in a closed-door meeting with the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.
If DeepSeek R1 had been trained on (Huawei chips) or a future open-source Chinese model had been trained to be highly optimized to Huawei chips, that would risk creating a global market demand for Huawei chips.
- NVIDIA via Reuters
There's no doubt in the fact that under US policies, Huawei and China have massively upscaled their AI capabilities. A prime example of this is Huawei's Ascend AI chips, which have managed to compete with NVIDIA's in-demand offerings such as the Hopper H100 and H20 AI accelerators. The Chinese firm has started to see adoption from tech giants like ByteDance and Tencent, and this doesn't look to stop now, as the firm has plans to unveil newer generations pretty soon that will likely feature far more capable performance. Judging by this, NVIDIA will have fewer cards to play if competition mounts up at its current pace.
Interestingly, Huawei unveiled its first cutting-edge AI cluster recently, the CloudMatrix 384, which features the Ascend 910B chip, and has performance comparable to NVIDIA's "Blackwell" GB200 NVL72 systems. Despite the fact that it comes at three times the cost, the cluster shows that the generational gap between Huawei and NVIDIA has significantly scaled down, which is what NVIDIA's CEO has warned the US lawmakers about.
It remains uncertain whether NVIDIA could see any "legal relaxation." The next big obstacle Team Green is set to face is the "AI Diffusion" rule, which will hinder the firm's presence in global markets. Under the Trump administration, NVIDIA saw its H20 AI chip banned, and based on what we are seeing, the firm has a tough road ahead.
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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