The CEO of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, warns that China is not far behind the US on AI development, and is in fact “very, very close” when delivering competing products and hardware for the growing AI industry. He then went to the Chinese tech giant Huawei prizes and called it “one of the most formidable technology companies in the world” and was prepared for its own AI chip production -efforts of Nvidia. He warned that the country has made enormous progress in recent years and could be a real rival for our alternatives.
Until recently, Nvidia was best known for its gaming -graphic hardware. Now it is one of the largest companies in the world and in the forefront of AI training and hardware design, with its H200 -graphic maps that drive some of the most advanced AIs around the world. In recent months, Chinese AI developments have made waves for their possibilities and efficiency, and now the CEO of Nvidia warns that they also catch up hardware.
“There is no doubt that Huawei is one of the most formidable technology companies in the world, and they are incredible in computing,” Huang told reporters, via Business Insider. “They are incredible in network technology and software options, all these possibilities to promote AI they have. They have made enormous progress in recent years.”
Nvidia’s H200 Tensor Core GPU pile.
Credit: Nvidia’s H200 GPUs are some of the most capable for training AI.
This is amid the US government that limits the sale of the China-specific H20 GPUs of Nvidia to the country, for fear that it can help accelerate China’s AI developments. Huang’s warning seems to suggest that without involvement of Nvidia the Chinese companies will fill the gaps instead. In the foreground of those developments, Huawei, a Chinese telecommsbedrijf that was initially rejected by Western countries in his attempts to contribute to the 5G rollout. It now produces AI hardware, with its cloud matrix 384 system that is being launched this year, and offers alleged competition with Nvidia GPUs in unprocessed performance.
Although Huawei and other Chinese companies develop new AI hardware in pace, some analysts point to their lack of established software ecosystems as a potential stumbling block. Where Nvidia’s Cuda has a robust family tree of software integration, the AI chips from Huawei don’t do that. That can hinder scalability, even if the AI hardware it produces is just as capable as it claims.
It is also important to remember that the task of CEOs such as Huang and OpenAi’s Sam Altman is to generate profit for their investors. That happens for Nvidia when it sells more GPUs, or if companies invest in chatgpt, which can be more likely if Western companies have the feeling that China is ready to surpass them. That does not mean that China does not develop AI hardware and that Nvidia and his partners have a fierce competition that will come off the pipe. But the goals of Nvidia with announcing these are probably not altruistic.
