BEIJING – US chip giant Nvidia has not yet recovered its lost sales in China despite Washington easing some restrictions, and the company is sounding the alarm about increasing competition from Chinese rivals.
“While small amounts of H200 [semiconductor] Although products for customers based in China have been approved by the U.S. government, we have not yet generated revenue,” Nvidia CFO Colette M. Kress said in a conference call on Wednesday local time, according to a FactSet transcript.
“We don’t know if any imports will be allowed into China,” she said.
China once accounted for at least a fifth of Nvidia’s data center revenue.
Global AI Disruption
The semiconductor giant also warned investors of increasing competition from the world’s second-largest economy.
“Our competitors in China, bolstered 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.
She called on the US to encourage every developer and company, including in China, to use American technology.
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In recent months, numerous Chinese AI chip makers and developers of large language models have gone public in Hong Kong and mainland China. Expectations that the companies could be alternatives to US-developed AI technology have helped stocks – such as: MiniMax and Moore Threads – surged shortly after their IPOs, although not all names posted sustained gains.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman also described Chinese tech companies’ progress across the stack as “remarkable” in an interview with CNBC on February 19. He also pointed out that Chinese technology companies are near the limit in some areas.
While Chinese AI companies lag slightly behind the US in terms of capabilities, their products are typically far cheaper than those of their American competitors.
“It’s easy to imagine a world where perhaps the majority of the world’s population will be running on a Chinese tech stack in five to 10 years,” Rory Green, chief China economist at TS Lombard and head of Asia research, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” earlier this month.
