NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said the company's share of artificial intelligence (AI) chip sales in China is now 0%. This is a sharp decline from the 66% NVIDIA held in 2024. Barriers to selling the latest and most powerful AI chips imposed by the US under the Joe Biden administration have caused NVIDIA's dominance in China to disappear almost overnight.
Huang also said that giving up a market as big as China "does not make strategic sense" and that US export policies "have eaten you up". The barriers should have crippled China's AI capabilities but have done the opposite. China has invested heavily in developing its own AI chips through companies such as Huawei, Cambricon, Moore Threads, and MetaX.
The latest DeepSeek V4 model, for example, was designed to be optimized when using Huawei's AI accelerators. China has proven that chip barriers have only slowed their progress but the gap is narrowing. The latest DeepSeek V4 model is said to be only 10 notches behind the capabilities of the most powerful US models.
Although NVIDIA's chip sales are said to be 0%, this only takes into account sales through channels that NVIDIA's most powerful chips are still being smuggled into China. Three individuals with ties to Super Micro Computer Inc were charged by the US Department of Justice in March with helping to smuggle at least $2.5 billion worth of NVIDIA AI chips into China.
