Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang backtracks after saying China will win AI race (seekingalpha.com)

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has publicly softened a recent claim that "China is going to win the AI race," telling the Financial Times instead that China is only a few "nanoseconds" behind the U.S. The shift — from an absolute prediction to a metaphorical, tightly framed gap — underscores both the razor-thin competitive differences emerging between the two AI ecosystems and the high sensitivity around public statements by leaders of key AI infrastructure companies. For the AI/ML community, Huang’s reversal matters because it highlights where competition is actually playing out: at the hardware, systems, and supply-chain level rather than in broad talent or algorithmic superiority. The "nanoseconds" phrasing implies micro-level distinctions — latency, interconnect speed, memory bandwidth, chip node advantages and datacenter configurations — that can nonetheless materially affect large-scale model training and inference. It also reflects geopolitical and commercial pressures (export controls, market access, and vendor neutrality) shaping which platforms and chips are available to researchers and companies in different regions. In short, the comment signals near-parity in many technical domains while reminding the community that small hardware and infrastructure differences, as well as policy constraints, will drive who leads practical AI deployment.