Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on competition with China: ‘Why wake up in the morning when…’

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has fired back at critics who argue the US should completely cut off China from advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The tech billionaire dismissed the idea that American companies should simply surrender foreign markets out of fear of competition, calling the mindset “completely ridiculous.”

“The idea that I regard as completely ridiculous is: why should American companies go compete in foreign countries if you are going to lose it anyway?” Huang said.He said if the same philosophy is followed in real life, why do we need to wake up when we have to eventually die.

“If you guys all apply that same philosophy, why wake up in the morning? If you want me to lose, you are going to have to deal it to me.”

What was the debate all about

Huang’s response came after an incident on the popular Dwarkesh Podcast, where he was questioned whether the US should sell AI chips to China. Dwarkesh Patel asked if giving China powerful AI chips could harm US companies and national security – and even used an example of Anthropic’s Mythos.

In response, Huang said China doesn’t need super high-end chips to challenge US tech stature. He said that Mythos was trained on “fairly mundane capacity,” meaning it didn't need super high-end chips, as stated by Tom's Hardware. He also repeated that China already has a lot of computing power, even if it's not as advanced as Nvidia's chips.

Huang argued that keeping Nvidia out of China won't actually stop their AI progress because Beijing already commands massive computing power. As an example, he pointed to the Huawei CloudMatrix system. Huang explained that even without access to Nvidia's latest and greatest hardware, Chinese engineers can use “brute force” – linking together massive quantities of slightly older or less advanced chips – to achieve the exact same powerful AI results.

According to the Nvidia chief, strict trade bans will backfire on American interests. Instead of freezing China’s tech sector, a total embargo will simply force Chinese firms to build an independent tech ecosystem completely outside of US control.

Huang warned that dividing the globe into two competing, incompatible technological systems—U.S. tech versus foreign tech—would be a "horrible outcome" for America's long-term global dominance.

Instead of building a wall, Huang believes the real winning strategy for the U.S. is to keep global AI development inside the American tech ecosystem by remaining competitive, selling internationally, and forcing rivals to play by Western standards.