Beijing – US chip giant Nvidia Although Washington has eased some restrictions, it has yet to recover its lost sales in China, and the company is warning of increasing competition from Chinese rivals.
“The US government has approved a small amount of H200 (semiconductor) products for China-based customers, we have not yet generated any revenue,” Nvidia’s CFO Colette M. Kress said on a Wednesday local time earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.
“We don’t know if any imports will be allowed into China,” he said.
China once accounted for at least a fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue.
Global AI disruption
The semiconductor giant warned investors about increasing competition from the world’s second-largest economy.
“Our competitors in China, fueled by recent IPOs, are making progress and have the potential to disrupt the structure of the global AI industry in the long term,” Kress said.
He urged the US to encourage every developer and business, including China, to use American technology.
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A flurry of Chinese AI chipmakers and large language model developers have gone public in Hong Kong and mainland China in the past few months. Stocks have been helped by expectations that companies could substitute for US-developed AI technology – for example Minimax and Moore Threads — surged soon after their IPOs, though not all names have seen sustained gains.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman described the progress of Chinese tech companies across the entire stack as “remarkable” in an interview with CNBC on February 19. He noted that Chinese tech companies are close to the border in some areas.
Although Chinese AI companies slightly lag the US in capabilities, their products are generally cheaper than their American competitors.
“You can easily see a world in five to 10 years where most of the world’s population is running on Chinese tech stock,” Rory Green, TS Lombard’s chief China economist and head of Asia research, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this month.
(tags to translate)Generative AI
