Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught between US, China’s ‘larger agendas’

LONDON: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday (Sep 17) that Washington and Beijing “have larger agendas to work out” as the tech giant navigates the tricky politics of the US-China trade war and tries to satisfy demand from companies worldwide hungry for the company’s crucial AI chips.

Huang was speaking in London after the Financial Times reported that China’s internet regulator had ordered top tech firms to halt purchases of the American company’s AI chips and cancel existing orders. 

China’s reported move comes after a Reuters report earlier in September that said major Chinese tech firms want more of Nvidia’s crucial artificial intelligence chips despite being discouraged from purchasing them by Beijing’s regulators.

While many companies have been caught in the middle of the US-China trade war, Nvidia is unique. It dominates the AI chip space and receives notable attention from both the White House and the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as the world’s two largest economies have been at loggerheads over trade for most of this year.

“We can only be in service of a market if a country wants us to be,” Huang said at the press conference in London, in response to a question about China’s regulations. 

“I’m disappointed with what I see, but they have larger agendas to work out between China and the United States, and I’m patient about it.” 

Shares of the company, valued at more than US$4.2 trillion, were down 2.6 per cent on Wednesday. Nvidia has had to scramble to deal with several unexpected developments, most recently Beijing’s accusation that the company violated its anti-monopoly law in a preliminary probe into Nvidia’s business practices. 

In mid-August, Trump engineered an unusual deal that granted Nvidia licenses to sell H20 chips to China – despite concerns about national security – in exchange for a 15 per cent cut of those sales, just days after he said he would not make such a deal.