Tech war: Top scientist urges China to develop alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA software

Li Guojie, a computer scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also suggests that OpenAI may be hitting the scaling wall

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Nvidia produces the world’s most popular AI chips. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 7:00pm, 5 Mar 2025

US chip giant Nvidia holds a significant advantage with its CUDA computing platform, while OpenAI may be unwise to heavily invest in the “scaling law”, according to a top Chinese scientist addressing two critical issues affecting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) development and US-China technology rivalry.

Li Guojie, a prominent computer scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the country’s AI accelerator chips – including those from Huawei Technologies’ Ascend series, Hygon Information Technology’s deep-learning computing unit and Cambricon Technologies – were comparable to Nvidia’s offerings in terms of hardware capabilities.

However, Nvidia’s true core strength lay in its CUDA ecosystem – which engineers use to develop applications on the firm’s graphics processing units (GPUs) – so China must develop an alternative system to achieve self-sufficiency in AI, Li said.

“DeepSeek has made an impact on the CUDA ecosystem, but it has not completely bypassed CUDA, as barriers remain,” Li, 81, said in comments published last Thursday by Study Times, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party’s senior cadre training school.

“In the long run, we need to establish a set of controllable AI software tool systems that surpass CUDA.”

Chinese start-up DeepSeek has upended assumptions about how much resources are needed to build advanced AI models. Photo: Xinhua

Li likened China’s efforts to replace Western hardware-software systems – such as Windows and Intel, or Android and Arm – with the need to build an AI software ecosystem. “It is an extremely arduous task that requires careful planning and long-term efforts,” he said.