Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned that Chinese AI models like DeepSeek running on the country’s domestic chips could be a ‘horrible outcome’ for the United States. In a recent podcast appearance, Huang argued against completely cutting off the Chinese market, stating that the creation of an independent tech ecosystem in the country could ultimately end up displacing US technology standards globally.
“As AI diffuses out into the rest of the world, their standards, their tech stack, will become superior to ours, because their models are open,” Huang said in a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast.
‘Horrible outcome for US’:
While discussing the rapid advancement of Chinese AI research, Huang pointed to DeepSeek as a major breakthrough.
“DeepSeek is not an inconsequential advance,” Huang noted, adding that “the day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation.”
The 63-year-old Nvidia chief also went on to explain that if an open-source model like DeepSeek is optimised specifically for Huawei’s architecture, it would put American hardware at a severe disadvantage.
“I’m going to give you the bad news, that AI models around the world are developed and they run best on non-American hardware,” Huang said. “That is bad news for us.”
“If the next years are critical, then we have to make sure that all of the world’s AI models are built on the American tech stack,” he added.
Huang noted that the AI industry is built on five layers and that the US needs to maintain its dominance across all of them, including the foundational chip layer.
Huang on sending chips to China:
During one heated moment in the podcast, the host Dwarkesh compared AI compute to “enriched uranium”, arguing that while the technology has positive uses, it should not be exported due to its potential to empower hostile nations with cyber-offensive capabilities. Patel also noted that some industry leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, support strict export controls for this reason.
Huang, however, firmly rejected the comparison, calling it a “lousy” and “illogical analogy”. He argued that comparing AI chips to nuclear weapons is “lunacy”, noting that microprocessors and DRAM are already widely exported and manufactured globally.
Instead of isolating the market, Huang argued that the US must combat the threat of cyber-attacks through international dialogue with researchers and foreign governments to establish safety boundaries. He warned that scaring the public into treating AI like a “nuclear bomb” does a fundamental disservice to the United States and the technology sector.
“You’re doing it a disservice. If we scare everybody out of doing software engineering jobs because it’s going to kill every software engineering job—and we don’t have any software engineers as a result of that—we’re doing a disservice to the United States,” he said on the podcast.
