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US-China tech war
TechTech War

Tech war: Nvidia CEO says Huawei has everyone ‘covered’ if US chip ban on China stays

Still, Jensen Huang says his company’s technology remains a generation ahead of those developed by Chinese rivals

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Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the VivaTech conference in Paris on June 11, 2025. Photo: Reuters
Ann Caoin Shanghai
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said his company’s technology remained a generation ahead of those developed by China, but warned that Huawei Technologies was in a position to expand its semiconductor business should US chip export curbs stay in place.
In an interview with US broadcaster CNBC on Thursday, Huang appeared to echo recent published remarks made by Huawei founder and CEO Ren Zhengfei, who said the Chinese company’s Ascend artificial intelligence (AI) processors lagged behind those from the US “by a generation”.

Ren, however, added that using methods like “stacking and clustering [on Ascend-powered machines], the computing results are comparable” to the most advanced systems in the world.

“AI is a parallel problem, so if each one of the computers are not capable … just add more computers,” Huang said in response to a question about Ren’s comments. “What he’s saying is that in China, [where] they have plenty of energy, they’ll just use more chips.”

“He was saying that China’s technology is good enough for China. If the United States doesn’t want to participate in China, Huawei has got China covered,” Huang added. “Huawei [also] has got everybody else covered.”
The 62-year-old Nvidia CEO’s televised comments, made on the sidelines of the annual VivaTech conference in Paris, reflect his concerns about Huawei’s growing AI chip capabilities, which he earlier raised during a closed-door meeting last month with the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

In an interview with CNBC last month, Huang described Huawei’s transformation into “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world”, following the Chinese firm’s progress in recent years with “essential capabilities to advance AI”.

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