Nvidia's Jensen Huang: 'China is going to win the AI race,' FT reports (www.reuters.com)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Financial Times that “China is going to win the AI race,” saying the country is only “nanoseconds behind America” in AI during comments at the FT’s Future of AI Summit. Huang reiterated that the U.S. should “race ahead” to win developers worldwide but warned that export controls and market barriers risk ceding half the world’s AI developer base to China. The remarks come amid an intensifying US-China tech rivalry: President Trump has suggested Nvidia’s most advanced Blackwell chips be reserved for American customers, while Nvidia says it has not pursued US export licenses to sell those chips in China, citing Beijing’s stance toward the company. The exchange highlights two intertwined technical and strategic flashpoints: high-end accelerators (Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture and the broader Nvidia systems stack) and the global developer ecosystem that runs on them. Even small hardware or latency advantages can translate into significant lead on large-scale models, but access to developers, data and deployment sites can offset microsecond- or “nanosecond”-scale edges. Export policy thus becomes a lever that shapes who controls AI standards, toolchains and talent. For the AI/ML community, this raises urgent implications for research collaboration, supply-chain resilience, and whether model development will bifurcate around distinct hardware and software ecosystems.