Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Wednesday he hopes to bring more advanced chips to the Chinese market than the current generation in an effort to revive sales in the world's second-largest economy.
The move comes after Nvidia announced on Monday that it would resume sales of its H20 artificial intelligence chip to China, a move that reversed a previous ban. The H20 is a low-end semiconductor designed for AI workloads that comply with U.S. export restrictions to China.
"I hope to bring more advanced chips than the H20 to the Chinese market," Huang said in response to questions at a press conference in Beijing, China.
"This is because technology is always evolving... Today's Hopper architecture is great, but in a few years, we will have more and better technology. I think it makes sense that anything we are allowed to sell in China will get better and better over time," he said, referring to the Nvidia chip architecture Hopper is based on.
Nvidia has been caught in the crosshairs of U.S.-China tensions over trade and technology. The tech giant has faced several rounds of restrictions that have forced it to restrict access of its most advanced chips to China. In response, Nvidia has developed semiconductors that comply with export restrictions, such as the H20.
Nvidia took a $4.5 billion writedown on the unsold H20 inventory in May and said sales in its last financial quarter would have been $2.5 billion higher without any export curbs.
Huang has trod a fine line between praising U.S. President Donald Trump's policies regarding reshoring chip manufacturing to America while also lobbying for change on curbs to China.
The Nvidia CEO has said that the Chinese artificial intelligence market could be worth $50 billion in the next two to three years, and it would be a "huge loss" for American companies not to be able to participate in it. Huang Renxun also said in an interview this year that if American companies cannot participate in the Chinese market, Nvidia's Chinese competitor Huawei will "provide security for the Chinese market."
"Export controls are something we can't control, and they can be quite disruptive to our business. Our job is just to inform governments of the nature of the policies they have made and the unintended consequences they may have," Huang Renxun said during a visit to Beijing.
Nvidia has also laid out a roadmap for releasing more advanced chips, although it is unclear whether the US government will allow Nvidia to sell more advanced products to Chinese companies. However, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Tuesday that the government will continue to allow chip sales to China so that companies in the market can rely on American technology.
Lutnick: "The idea is that the Chinese are fully capable of making their own chips. We want to be one step ahead of them, so they have been buying our chips."