Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang touts US manufacturing plans, warns China export controls threaten US chip lead
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang touted the company’s plans to manufacture its AI chips in the US, while warning against export controls that limit its ability to ship products to China.
Huang made the comments during Nvidia’s fiscal first quarter earnings call on Wednesday, saying that he expects the company to build everything from chips to supercomputers in America by the end of the year.
To do that, Huang explained, Nvidia is working with Taiwanese companies ranging from TSMC (TSM) and Foxconn (FXCOF) to Wistron to manufacture its various components.
Huang said during the call,
To encourage and support these investments, we’ve made substantial long-term purchase commitments, a deep investment in America’s AI manufacturing future,
Huang’s statements come after President Trump criticized Apple (AAPL) for not moving iPhone manufacturing to America and threatened to add a 25% tariff to the company’s products if it doesn’t commit to such a move.
While Huang said he agrees with Trump’s desire to bring manufacturing back to the US, he warned against the administration’s decision to ban Nvidia chip sales to China, saying that the AI platform that wins China is positioned to lead globally.
Huang said, adding that China’s AI will move on with or without US-made chips like Nvidia’s,
China is one of the world’s largest AI markets and a springboard to AI success,
Nvidia announced that the Trump administration banned sales of its H20 chip to China in April and reported a $4.5 billion revenue impact in its first fiscal quarter. The company said it will also miss out on $8 billion worth of H20 revenue in its second quarter.
What’s more, Nvidia says it can no longer build chips on its Hopper platform to manufacture chips for China. The company’s Hopper line is the predecessor to Nvidia’s current Blackwell chips.
Nvidia specifically designed the H20 to meet the Biden administration’s restrictions on AI chips destined for China. But DeepSeek sent shockwaves through Washington and Wall Street when it proved it could produce powerful AI models using below top-of-the-line Nvidia chips. As a result, President Trump imposed tighter restrictions on the company’s chips, banning the sale of H20s in the country.
Huang, however, said it’s not just about selling hardware into China.
He said,
The AI race isn’t just about chips,
adding that the more important aspect of the US-China AI battle is the software stack that companies build on.
Huang has previously laid out how important it is for Nvidia to continue to compete in China, explaining that the country has half of the world’s AI developers and that driving those workers to build on Chinese chips would hurt not just Nvidia, but also the US’ national security goals.
Though Nvidia is unable to sell into China, it did win a reprieve from the Biden administration’s planned AI diffusion rules. Those regulations would have created a three-tier system broken down by countries that can freely purchase chips, those that needed licenses to buy them, and those that were banned from ordering chips.
But the Trump administration tossed out those rules before they were scheduled to go into place this month. Still, it plans to introduce its own regulations sometime in the future.
Nvidia also benefited from Trump’s visit to the Middle East, with the company set to sell hundreds of thousands of chips to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as part of those countries’ own sovereign AI plans, or AI services operated and funded by governments rather than individual independent companies.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang touts US manufacturing plans, warns China export controls threaten US chip lead, source
