If the US military wouldn’t be caught dead building supercomputers using Chinese kit, there’s no reason to think the People’s Liberation Army would risk doing the same, argues Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
“The Chinese military, no different than the American military, will not seek each other’s technology out to be built on top of it,” he said during a recent interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
Huang’s rationale is the Chinese can’t rely on the technology to work when they need it, as it could be “limited at any time.”
He added that it’s not as though China’s military doesn’t have access to enough computing power already. “If you just think about the number of supercomputers that are in China, built by amazing Chinese engineers that are already in operation, they don’t need Nvidia’s chips or American tech stacks in order to build their military.”
It’s well established at this point that China is already home to some of the most powerful supercomputers, and many of these are powered by homegrown silicon.
However, the idea that Beijing wouldn’t use Nvidia’s chips even if it could get their hands on them is a bit naive, he opined. China’s Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) has reportedly employed Intel and Nvidia-based systems to further the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons.
Huang’s comments come as he heads to Beijing and in the wake of repeated steps by both the Biden and Trump administrations to limit the sale of advanced semiconductors, like Nvidia’s chips, in China.
The most recent crackdown saw the sale of Nvidia’s H20 accelerators — essentially a cut-down version of its H200 GPUs designed for the Chinese market — blocked. As we’ve previously reported, this decision will cost Nvidia $10.5 billion in lost revenues in the first half of the 2026 fiscal year.
Among the reasons given for the effective ban were that these chips could fuel Chinese supercomputing efforts into AI and other military applications. Supercomputers are commonly employed by world governments, including the US, for military research and development, as well as nuclear proliferation.
Huang is not a fan of these rules, which have effectively cut off Nvidia from a nation with one of the greatest possible potentials to fuel the company’s growth. “China’s incredible in AI because 50 percent of the world’s AI developers are in China,” he said, arguing that efforts to deny the Middle Kingdom American silicon have backfired, encouraging the development of homegrown alternatives.
If the US is serious about maintaining its technological advantage, it should ensure that world AIs, including those built by the Chinese, are developed using American silicon, Huang told Zakaria.
Huang isn’t alone in making this argument. Executives from Microsoft, AMD, OpenAI, and CoreWeave have made similar comments following Uncle Sam’s latest round of AI chip restrictions. ®