Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent apparent comment that China is winning the AI race made headlines across America. It went so ‘wild’ that the Nvidia CEO had to issue a clarification. During a fireside chat at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this month, Huang directly spoke about his statement on Chinese AI dominance vs America’s. CSIS President John Hamre asked Huang what he termed “very provocative”: You said something recently that was quite provocative. You said that China was winning the AI race, the AI competition. I know that you’ve got a powerful competitor in Huawei, and Huawei has a lot of advantages you don’t have. Why don’t you describe this competition? Are we really losing?In his reply to Hamre, Huang said, “And it apparently caught a lot of attention. As you know with headlines, the disclaimer part, the foundation part was left out of the headline. But the way to think about that is that let me just handicap it right now. If you look at AI and go back to the first thing that we said, AI is a five layer cake. Let’s just always simplify it. It’s not quite this simplistic, but let’s simplify AI into a five layer cake. Energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications. And let’s handicap it from bottom to top. At the lowest level, China has twice the amount of energy we have as a nation.”
China dominance in Energy is one of the ‘deal breakers’
“Twice as much energy as we have as a nation. And our economy’s larger than theirs. Makes no sense to me. We also know that one of the most important initiatives, one of the most important policies of this administration. And there was the first thing that President Trump said to me when we met: “Listen, we need to reindustrialize America. We need to do onshore manufacturing again. We need to help America make things again.” It’s going to create jobs. That part of the economy has been offshore and completely gutted the United States. We need to bring that back and he needs my help to do so. And so, that entire sector of the economy is missing,” Nvidia CEO went on to add. Then Huang added the energy problem that America is facing, where China is miles ahead. While talking about the same Huang did give a compliment to President Trump, saying that he is trying his best to solve the problem. “And however, without energy, how do we build chip plants, computer system plants, and these AI data centers? We call them AI factories. We’re simultaneously building three different types of factories in the United States. Chip factories, super computer factories, and AI factories, they all require energy, every single one of them. And so on, the one hand, we want to reindustrialize the United States. How do you do that without energy? And so, the fact that we vilified energy for so long, President Trump sticking his neck out, and taking it on the chin, and helping the country realize that energy is necessary for our growth, is really one of the greatest things he’s done right off the bat,” Huang said.
America is generations ahead in Chips
He said that while America is 50% of China in energy, the country is generationals ahead in Chips. But at the same time warned that the country cannot afford to be complacent. As semiconductors is a manufacturing process and anybody who thinks China can’t manufacture is missing a big idea. “And so, now at the energy level, back to that stack, we’re 50% and they’re growing straight up. We’re kind of flat right now. And so, number one, energy. Number two, chips. We’re generations ahead. We are generations ahead on chips, and I think everybody recognizes that. Number three, infrastructure. If you want to build a data center here in the United States, from breaking ground to standing up an AI supercomputer is probably about three years. They can build a hospital on a weekend. That’s a real challenge. And so, at the infrastructure layer, their velocity of building things, because they are builders. Their velocity of building things is extraordinarily high. Now, really quickly on chips. We’re several generations ahead, but don’t be complacent. Remember, semiconductors are a manufacturing process. Anybody who thinks China can’t manufacture is missing a big idea,” Hunag said.
