Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang said the U.S. must treat China as a major rival in chips, AI, and research while competing globally through innovation and infrastructure.
Huang made the remarks during an interview with Yahoo Finance journalist Deirdre Bosa on the sidelines of Nvidia’s GTC Berlin conference on Wednesday. Asked about reports that DeepSeek and Huawei are working together on chip designs, Huang said the U.S. should always take China “seriously” as both a manufacturing powerhouse and technology competitor.
Huang said, “If there’s one country that could manufacture things at scale,” it is China. He lauded Beijing’s capacity to produce chips, open AI models, and even AI researchers at enormous scale.
“We’ve got to recognize that we have very, very serious competition,” he said.
However, Huang added that American frontier laboratories, computing systems and infrastructure remain the strongest in the world.
He said that the U.S. government and policymakers have made it possible for American companies to be in Africa and Central Asia, and would like to compete in Brazil, Egypt and other markets.
China’s AI Push Pressures Nvidia
The warning comes as Huawei gains ground in China’s AI accelerator market. An IDC analysis, earlier this month, found Nvidia held 34% of the market during the first half of 2026, compared with 28% for Huawei. Nvidia shipped 678,000 accelerators in China during that period, but its shipments fell 44% from the same period a year earlier, according to the report.
Previously, Huang urged the U.S. to embrace China’s AI models rather than ban them, calling the technology “excellent” and arguing that open-source models can expand AI adoption without threatening closed-model providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Huang also dismissed concerns that China could use these models to undermine U.S. companies, saying there was “Zero possibility” of Chinese AI driving American firms out of the market.
Meanwhile, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a podcast interview that China trails the U.S. in AI by about six months but could still prevail because its products are offered free. He said China’s low-cost and free AI models, along with open-weight systems, could gain traction in developing economies that cannot afford expensive Western alternatives.
Price Action: Year-to-date, Nvidia stock surged 15.78%, as per Benzinga Pro. On Thursday, the stock was trading 2.73% lower at $215.92.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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