Nvidia chief lauds China's tech savvy

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang expressed resounding confidence in China's technological development during a wide-ranging interview with China Daily in Beijing on Wednesday, highlighting the nation's distinctive advantages in artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and electric vehicle innovation.

Huang emphasized China's "unique strengths" driving technological advancement — world-class AI capabilities demonstrated by breakthroughs like DeepSeek's open-source reasoning model; exceptional expertise in mechatronics and electromechanical systems; and a massive manufacturing ecosystem enabling rapid robotics deployment.

"These conditions are uniquely concentrated in China, making me incredibly optimistic about its robotics development trajectory. Nvidia has been coming to China for 30 years and China is the second-largest technology market in the world and it is also growing very quickly. So this is a very important market there's a lot of very dynamic and innovative customers. In China, we have very challenging, dynamic and very innovative customers and we want to be able to serve them and I will continue to do that," Huang said.

The comments came as the senior executive paid his third visit to China this year, highlighting the importance of the Chinese market to Nvidia, which has become the first company in the world with a market cap of $4 trillion. Huang also attended the opening ceremony of the third China International Supply Chain Expo on Wednesday.

"The electric vehicles in China are probably, in the last five years, the most surprising to the world in terms of the advancement. On purely technical styling, you know, objective basis, the cars are absolutely great," Huang said.

In a candid remark referencing the unavailability of Chinese EVs such as Xiaomi's cars in the US market, Huang said "That's our misfortune, not yours."

When addressing competition with Huawei in AI chips, Huang recognized the Shenzhen, Guangdong province-based firm as "a formidable technology company" with deep excellence in semiconductors and networking infrastructure.

Analyzing China's broader AI landscape, Huang outlined a three-tier ecosystem driving progress — foundational infrastructure including chips and systems; rapidly evolving AI models such as Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's Kimi; and hyper-competitive application development.

On Tuesday, Nvidia said it will resume sales of H20 chips to China, and it also announced a new, fully compliant GPU, or graphics processing unit, for the Chinese market.

Nvidia is filing applications to sell the H20 GPU to China again as the US government has assured the company that licenses will be granted, and that Nvidia hopes to start deliveries soon.

Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Zhongguancun Modern Information Consumer Application Industry Technology Alliance, a telecom industry association, said the resumption of H20 chip sales was good news for both Nvidia and Chinese companies that seek to purchase such products.

"This is a win-win result," Xiang said, adding that China is the world's largest semiconductor market that companies ignore at their peril.

The Chinese mainland consumes more than half of the world's semiconductors, which are then assembled into tech products and reexported or sold in the domestic market, said research firm Daxue Consulting.

masi@chinadaily.com.cn