Nvidia CEO on Trump's plan to curb AI chips to China: Biden-era controls were a failure.
Huang said the U.S. measures impede NVIDIA's growth in China, where the company has seen its control fall from 95% to 50% since Biden's arrival in 2021.
Jensen Huang, CEO of the American chipmaker NVIDIA, criticized Joe Biden's curbs on exporting artificial intelligence chips to China. He emphasized that the measure cost his and other companies billions of dollars in sales, calling it a “failure.”
Huang is participating in Computex Taipei 2025, an exhibition in Taiwan that showcased new advances in AI technology. The businessman said that Biden's administration approved a system that forbids the export of advanced chips to China in order to stop their development of military technology.
Why did NVIDIA CEO criticize Biden's curbs?
“All in all, the export controls were a failure,” said the CEO to reporters on the sidelines of the event. Huang also stated that the curbs Biden applied were based on the assumption that the U.S. is the sole source of AI technology. He added that China is home to 50% of the world's AI researchers.
Those curbs caused his company to lose its Chinese market. Now, NVIDIA controls 50% of it, compared to the 95% they had at the beginning of the Biden administration in 2021, according to Huang. He also emphasized that his products have instead turned to local Chinese sources such as Huawei, which are leading the market right now.
President Donald Trump and Jensen Huang during president's tour through Mid West. Photo: AFP News
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Huang talked to Trump about the curbs
Jensen Huang was alongside President Donald Trump on his Middle East trip last week with other tech leaders. He praised the president's “great reversal” in mindset regarding Biden's policy. “He sees very clearly that the race is on,” he said, “and if the United States wants to stay ahead, we need to maximize and accelerate our diffusion, not limit it, because somebody else is more than happy to provide it.”
Beijing has criticized the American curbs, including last week's announcement about products that could violate U.S. export controls if they use chips such as Huawei's Ascend without a license. NVIDIA said last April that they wrote off nearly $5.5 million on H2O AI chips, a new technology meant for the Chinese market. However, Trump's administration also forbids their export.
