Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang lauded China’s progress in open source artificial intelligence and pledged to work with Chinese companies, as the chip designer driving the growth of AI resumes shipping its sought-after chips to the country.
Large language models (LLM) developed by Chinese companies, including DeepSeek, Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, MiniMax and Baidu, were “world class”, “developed here and shared openly”, and had spurred AI developments worldwide, Huang said.
China’s open source AI was a “catalyst for global progress” that was “giving every country and industry a chance to join the AI revolution”, he said on Wednesday during the opening ceremony of the China International Supply Chain Expo, which until Sunday in Beijing.
Clad in a dark suit instead of his signature black leather jacket, Huang was speaking as the guest of honour at the expo on his third trip to the Chinese capital city this year. His California-based chip-design firm, established in 1993, is poised to resume shipments of its made-for-China H20 chips to China.
The US government “assured Nvidia that licences will be granted” for exporting the H20 chip, a made-for-China product that was less powerful than Nvidia’s gold-standard acceleration chip, according to a Tuesday statement by the company.
After the announcement, Tencent said it was in the process of applying to buy Nvidia chips, according to a Reuters report. ByteDance said the report of its application was “not accurate”.
“I’m very happy that the export control has been lifted on H20 so that we can serve the market,” Huang said during a group interview on Tuesday in Beijing.
Nvidia also planned to release a “new, fully compliant” RTX PRO graphics processing unit (GPU) for China that was “ideal for digital twin AI for smart factories and logistics,” the company said.
The resumption of sales was a boon for Nvidia as the world’s first US$4 trillion company gained access to one of the largest investors in AI, where funding could grow 48 per cent this year to US$98 billion, according to a forecast by Bank of America. It is also a breakthrough for China’s developers of LLMs and other AI uses, as they get their hands on some of the most advanced chips for high-powered computing.
Huang’s affirmation of China’s open-source progress came as Nvidia seemingly shrugged aside the 17 per cent plunge in its valuation in late January after DeepSeek’s roll-out opened the possibility that LLMs could be developed at a fraction of the cost typically needed. Nvidia’s shares have since regained their surge, pushing the company to become the first in history to surpass US$4 trillion in capitalisation.
Huang on Wednesday also stressed Nvidia’s role in Chinese tech firms’ achievements. China achieved “super fast innovation” thanks to its researchers, developers and entrepreneurs, and more than 1.5 million developers in China were building on Nvidia platforms today, he said.
Switching between English and halting Mandarin, the Taiwanese-American entrepreneur said that the expo had “a massive scale and a vibrant atmosphere”, which showed China’s “support for innovation”.
Huang’s comments reflect his efforts to convey Nvidia’s commitment to the Chinese market amid a tumultuous chip war between the world’s two largest economies. Nvidia’s H20 GPU, released in early 2024, was tailor-made for the Chinese market after exports of its advanced AI chips such as the A100, H100, A800 and H800 were banned under intensifying US export controls.
The US chip giant said in May that Washington would start to require a licence to export H20 chips to China, a move Huang called “deeply painful” and “deeply uninformed”. Nvidia expected the ban to cost the company around US$5.5 billion.
Huang also shared a positive outlook for AI’s role in manufacturing. The world’s most advanced factories will be powered by robots and AI within a decade, as machine learning and automation replace humans in assembly line work, especially those that were repetitive and hazardous, he added.
“Today, AI is [a] fundamental infrastructure, like electricity and the internet before, [and] AI is revolutionising the supply chain, changing how we build and move things,” Huang said. “Hundreds of projects in China are simulating digital twins in Nvidia’s omniverse to design and optimise factories and warehouses.”
-- SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
