Huang Renxun: China has long surpassed the computational power threshold to train Mythos-level models. Export restrictions will only accelerate Huawei's rise.
According to TechInsight's Monitor, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang strongly opposed AI chip export control policies in an interview with Dwarkesh Patel, arguing that not only would this fail to curb China's AI capabilities, but it had also produced unintended consequences in recent years.
Huang's central argument is that China has crossed the threshold. He stated that China has a significant amount of 7nm chip production capacity and abundant cheap energy, and AI training is a parallel computing problem where more older chips can compensate for the performance gap of a single chip. "The capability threshold you are worried about, China has long surpassed it, and even exceeded it," said Huang. Anthropic's Mythos was trained on a "fairly ordinary scale of compute," which is widely available in China. Huang pointed out that Huawei recently achieved its highest annual performance in history, shipping millions of chips, "far more than what Anthropic has." However, Huawei's 2025 annual report shows a revenue of 880.9 billion yuan, the second-highest in history, lower than the peak of 891.4 billion yuan in 2020.
He also emphasized that China has approximately 50% of the world's AI researchers, where algorithmic innovation often determines the model's capability limit more than computational power stacking. DeepSeek is cited as specific evidence: "DeepSeek is not a progress that can be ignored. If, someday in the future, a model at the DeepSeek level is released first on Huawei chips, it will be a terrible outcome for our country." This hypothetical scenario may soon become a reality as reported by The Information, where DeepSeek is preparing to release the V4 model on Huawei Ascend chips, expected to launch in late April, becoming the first cutting-edge AI model independent of NVIDIA hardware. Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent are also heavily procuring Huawei chips, causing prices to surge by about 20% within weeks.
The export control measures have backfired. The restrictions have accelerated the rise of China's domestic chip industry, forcing the Chinese AI ecosystem to pivot towards optimizing for local hardware. Huang believes this is a real threat to the United States: "If in the future AI models run best on someone else's tech stack, that is the real crisis for America." China holds about 40% of the global tech industry, abandoning this market would damage America's long-term chip-level competitiveness.
He made a clear distinction between two parallel goals: domestically maintaining computational power leadership while competing in the global market. "We should not voluntarily give up the market. If we end up losing, we lose. But why hand it over willingly?"
